Last week, I took some time away from work to travel back to Minnesota and camp in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) with my friends. When I was growing up in Wisconsin, my dad took my brothers and me to the BWCA with

I recommend these tech talks to everyone I know in software. They've been deeply influential in my engineering practices, and I think about them often when I'm working to write high-quality code. Thank you to everyone who contributed to these talks – I couldn't do

As engineers, we often have grand ideas of fantastic things we could build to solve everyone's problems. We spend a couple of months building and deploying a prototype that we're proud of, only to discover that everyone hates our solution. The tool we built

This is my list of resources for folks who want to learn more about site reliability engineering, embracing risk, and building observable systems. Last updated 2020-08-27. Site Reliability Engineering: Embracing Risk: The Site Reliability Engineering book outlines the Google Way for keeping the lights

If you participate in street activism and attend actions, you probably understand the value of having a smartphone on you with an active data plan. The Signal secure messenger runs purely on data networks, and it can be useful to have a live mapping

Two months ago, I picked up a basic little road bike and turned it into a fixie commuter. What's so great about a fixie? They're simple Fixed-gear bikes are way simpler than geared bikes. Reducing the number of moving parts on your bike means

Here's my strategy to getting the used stuff I want at insane prices. I've used this to buy bicycles, motorcycles, home furniture, and kitchen equipment. If the thing you're looking for isn't one-of-a-kind, I think you'll have luck with this approach. As a brief

I'm writing this article for someone who works in tech and is looking for a new job, but wants to be somewhat selective and build stuff they believe in. If that describes you, read on! On June 3, I left my job at Punch

Working title: You got Markdown in my LaTeX! I hate writing documents in Microsoft Word and Apple Pages. I spend way too much time fiddling with formatting, page layout, and typesetting before everything looks the way I want it. And writing math equations, even

One of the frameworks we're building at Punch Through Design links to Dropbox to help users access their files from both iOS and their computer. Dropbox provides a very useful Sync SDK for iOS that makes it easy to access Dropbox accounts. Installing the

Last week, I built a command-line tool, csvtomd, to help me write documentation for my personal and work projects. Building Markdown tables by hand can be tedious and often involves lots of manual spacing tweaks to make the source code look just as good

It's really not that bad. I think I might prefer it to Android soon. Interface Builder and Storyboards are nicer than Android's XML layouts, but you have the learning curve of the message-passing component linking GUI. I was really annoyed with iOS for using

This post is a WIP outline. Feel free to read it if you'd like. People love attending fireworks events and laser light shows. It's awe-inspiring to see coordinated events happen on a scale so much larger than a single person. It's even more incredible

Ever heard an album or a song for the first time and loved it so much you played it on repeat for three days straight? I wanted to dig into my listening history to find out which songs I loved, got sick of, and

I just rediscovered some code I wrote for the University of Minnesota's "Structure of Computer Programming I", a course I took three years ago. CSCI 1901 focused mostly on learning Scheme with everyone's favorite Scheme textbook, the venerable SICP from MIT. To

Your website looks like it's from '06. Your images look blurry when those kids pull up your site on their fancy new Retina MacBooks and iPad Airs. What do? Wait for srcset to come out Implement srcset-polyfill with code that isn't production-ready Send your

Auto route, yo. (Check out the HTML5 video here.)

The other day I was using the fantastic file diff application Kaleidoscope, and I wanted to integrate the diff functionality with my SVN client. Kaleidoscope provides a terminal tool called KSdiff that integrates the GUI Kaleidoscope application with other programs. However, after installing KSdiff

tl;dr If you want to get started with your Latitude data right away, check out my gist at the bottom. I've started a new project! I'm investigating ways to share my life with others electronically, with little to no conscious effort on my

Author's note: Google took down Google Latitude and Locality is no longer online. But my code is still around, and I'll leave this up in case anyone finds anything of use! I've always been fascinated by the idea of real-time location data. The first

Author's note: This was migrated from an Octopress blog. I think the data is still relevant to anyone trying to run Octopress and deploy to NearlyFreeSpeech, so I've kept the post online in its old form. Enjoy! Hello! I'm Matthew Lewis, and this is