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patrickctengon In MySQL, use “utf8mb4” instead of “utf8” (2016)

I've had to "upgrade" a couple to utf8, and varchar(255) bites me all the time.

I want one.

patrickctengon Best practices for REST API design (2020)

I love this comment so much.

With GraphQL, you're just pushing N+1 calls and figuring out the mental contortion needed to support all the graphy-ness from non-graph structures. Most that say GraphQL is the bees-knees must be an FE developer. There's nothing wrong with that, but GraphQL is just NOT as cracked up to be.

patrickctengon The Database Inside Your Codebase

I found it hard to read too.

patrickctengon XLS: Accelerated HW Synthesis

ditto

patrickctengon Average adult will spend 34 years of their life staring at screens

So, as a child my mom always insisted on me reading with lots of lights turned on. She claimed that reading the dark causes short sightedness and etc.

Now, as an adult, I find that I have my screen's brightness turned up way more than my peers. For example, although it's currently very sunny right now in LA, I have my brightness turned up 100% on my 16" MBP. Though, in the evenings, it's more comfortable at 3 or 4 steps down from 100%.

I can't help but to wonder -- did she condition my eye to be less sensitive to light and have thus slightly ruined my low-light vision?

patrickctengon L.A. Times to Furlough Workers as Ad Revenue ‘Nearly Eliminated’

I think ProPublica does what you're describing.

patrickctengon Design checklist for perfect charts

I'd like to add that Wall Street Journal's Guide to Informational Graphics is a great one too.

patrickctengon Walmart will begin offering to subsidize college tuition for its U.S. workers

I have a B.A. in History (Pre-industrial Europe and Far East, and post-WWII American Foreign Policy) degree from UC Davis, and I ended up full-stack programming for the last 12 years.

I use those History skills daily from writing documentation, synthesizing concepts into a coherent work, and figuring out the intent of the original coder.

My History degree is definitely not useless.

patrickctengon Atomically thin LED opens the possibility for invisible displays

Float-in-the-air 3D displays/images are in the labs already! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-01125-y

patrickctengon Exercises in Programming Style

I"ve been coding professionally for the last 12 years -- I'm 34 now -- and my code definitely still looks like example 2.

Maybe it's because I code in multiple languages daily, but I tend to not use a lot of the language features for each language. A part of it is definitely thinking about the ones that come after me, and wanting everyone -- from every background -- to be immediately able to reason about the code without having to look up what every syntax feature does.

I guess it's a fine line between depth of language features used vs. readability once one is gone from the project.