std::blog
Just a standard tech blog. Software, code, open-source, a splash of humour.
Sometimes serious. Blog entries are infrequently posted, but I update when I
feel its necessary :-)
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02 Dec 2021
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year
Christmas is in danger! Can we save it with Kotlin?
30 July 2020It's 2020, can we finally get strings right?
Just about every modern programming language has good string interpolation by now, what's up C++?
24 July 2020Musing: Use of users
Good programmers, engineers, and product people spend a lot of time thinking about their users. But "user" feels like a dirty word.
19 June 2020SIGVERT — Virtue signalling in tech
2020 has been a hard year, and this month has been terrible. In this post, I talk briefly about virtue signalling and what it means to me to be an effective ally.
20 June 2019Mostly painless packaging for Python
Putting snakes into boxes so they won't upset a penguin... This is a brief post about packaging Python applications for Linux, without using Pypi.
31 May 2019Warnings are not errors
An argument against the conflation of compiler warnings and errors in software development.
07 July 2018MLH Ethical Tech Initiative Scholarship
I am incredibly honoured to announce that I am the winner of the 2018 Major League Hacking Ethical Tech Initiative!
21 Nov 2017Reflections as an Undergraduate Research Assistant
Over the past year or so I've been fortunate enough to work with a group of really amazing people at the University Guelph. This post summarizes in a high-level overview my experiences working for the University, and how I've grown as a software developer and academic since October of 2016.
17 May 2017I went to OCE Discovery
No, I am not a business person. Yes, I went to a business conference. This post honestly overview my experiences at one of the biggest yearly conferences in Ontario, and how — by some dumb luck and with a bit of elbow grease — I ended up being there.
26 Mar 2017Gimme your cookies!
This blog post overviews some web security basics and demonstrates how cookies (unfortunately not the snack ) can be stolen with less than 10 lines of code.
01 Dec 2016Experimenting with Ubuntu Touch
Android has been pissing me off lately, and I wanted something new: Ubuntu Touch. In this article, I explore Canonical's mobile operating system, review some issues and some awesome things, and explain some hacky things you can do for fun.
08 Nov 2016La Capitaine
La Capitaine, my custom icon theme for Linux desktops, is now the most popular grossing icon theme on OpenDesktop!
19 Sept 2016Gelato Labs
Introducing Gelato Labs, a small, open-source game development lab! We write dumb software so you don't have to (feel free to join us).
22 Mar 2016XMPP and a little bird
XMPP is a robust, free and open-source protocol for instant messaging. Pidgin is a pretty (and useful!) client.
02 Feb 2016Social Media Alternatives
I think social media giants are at least a little bit evil. Here's why, and I'm doing about it.
25 July 2015I'll huff and I'll puff
As part of my high school computer science course work, I studied and implemented the Huffman lossless compression algorithm in a C++ program, which I dubbed "huffpuff". This blog entry is about that experience. This brief article will function as an introduction to lossless compression algorithms, and go into more specific details about Huffman coding, what it does, and how it was implemented.
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28 Aug 2020Mozilla — Firefox: Workterm Report S20
From 2020 May through August, I had the opportunity to remotely intern with Mozilla Inc. as a member of the Firefox performance team. This blog post documents my experience, goals and learning outcomes from the four (4) months I spent with them this summer.
29 Apr 2020Square — Cash App Workterm Report W20
From 2020 Jan through April, I had the opportunity to intern with Square Inc. on their Cash App product, in the Toronto engineering office. This blog post documents my experience, goals and learning outcomes from the four (4) months I spent with them this winter.
11 Jan 2019Square — Cash App Workterm Report S19
From 2019 May through August, I had the opportunity to intern with Square Inc. on their Cash App product, in the Kitchener-Waterloo engineering office. This blog post documents my experience, goals and learning outcomes from the four (4) months I spent with them this summer.
11 Jan 2019Left™ Workterm Report S18-F19
From 2018 May through December I had the opportunity to intern with Left Inc., a technology company based in Metro Vancouver, Canada. This blog post documents my goals and learning outcomes from the eight (8) months I spent on the west coast working on the RightMesh Project.