I’m wrapping a (stateless, hit-every-time) REST API and my design was challenged with an alternative opinion - which is great! I get to have a more serious think about design and what might work best. I have an internal function which does the actual talking to the server, e.g. .get_from_API() …
Finished reading: Neuromancer by William Gibson 📚 I was recommended this on one of the socials and figured it was about time to get around to it. As the ‘first’ “cyber” sci-fi book it was well-written and despite being conservative in its predictions for the future, many of …
Finished reading: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek I posted about this one after a few chapters because it started to get on my nerves. I think I hate-finished it. The author makes some more questionable connections (a bow needs to pulled away from the …
Finished reading: Sea of Tranquility: A novel by Emily St. John Mandel I don’t know if it was timely or unfortunate that I read this book so close to The End of Eternity - both had very similar themes, but Asimov is just so good at weaving the threads together into an engrossing story. I think …
Finished reading: 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson My library had several copies of this on the shelf, so I assumed it was popular or new. The latter is certainly true (2021). This is a collection of short essays detailing the journey from the first analytical …
Finished reading: The New Childhood: Raising Kids to Thrive in a Connected World by Jordan Shapiro Another break from biology, certainly more towards psychology. This one I found randomly (promoted) at the library and given that it’s my kids' school holidays at the moment and they’re …
Finished reading: The End of Eternity by Isaac Asimov Easily one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time, and it’s easy to see why. I’ve loved many of them, but I haven’t read anywhere near all of Asimov’s works. I saw this one on a shelf and figured it would be a …
Currently reading: Start With Why by Simon Sinek I was recommended this book by someone whose opinion I hold in high regard, but so far I’m not enjoying this book. Not necessarily for the material - I think I can appreciate the points being made about having a defined ‘why’ behind …
Finished reading: The Cell by Joshua Z. Rappoport 📚 I enjoyed this book - it started with a good overview of the cellular biology but did move on to more organ-based systems, which was perfect for me. The explanations of the lab and microscopy techniques, advancements, innovations, and discoveries …
Currently reading: The Cell: Discovering the Microscopic World that Determines our Health, our Consciousness, and our Future by Joshua Z. Rappoport Continuing with the technical theme, so far this is a deep dive into the very specific mechanisms of molecular biology without (yet) too much emphasis …
Life Unfolding: How the Human Body Creates Itself by Jamie A. Davies How a single cell develops into a full human, and a lot of the molecular biology along the way. I thoroughly enjoyed this read - every chapter had highly interesting points about the particular pathways involved and how the cells …
(backlog from March 2022) Life from an RNA World: The Ancestor Within by Michael Yarus This was a nice tour of how the complex mechanisms of DNA replication came to be, and how the process works to produce proteins and phenotypes. This was the first time I really felt I understood the difference …
I love small projects for helping me learn, especially programming. I’m still learning Julia, and have found myself wanting more “little silly things” I can digest and learn from. A lot of the projects I see in Julia are big mathematical models, and I’m just not ready to dive …
As part of what will hopefully become a larger post, I’m interested in finding an R way to achieve the following: given an n x n matrix of zeroes with a single non-zero element of some value v, fill the surrounding entries such that each other element is at most one less than those surrounding …
I’m still fairly new to Julia, even though I’ve been trying to learn it for a few years. It’s extremely powerful (fast, expressive, … whatever metric you want to use) but with that comes some complexity. I saw this post in my feed and it seemed like a great bite-sized chunk …
I like blogging, but in the spirit of lowering the resistance to getting posts out, I’ve started a micro blog jcarroll.xyz where I’ll capture shorter, less polished pieces and random thoughts / snippets. This is my first post, testing all the functionality. DNS might still take a little …