New Life#
Recently, we’ve welcomed a baby into our world. This experience has been brand new for me, despite having an older kiddo already. It has been hard and joyful and more than I ever could have imagined. I am in love. I wish I could elaborate more, and spill my soul talking about my new child, but this blog is public and I would rather keep some things a little more private.
On that note, I’ve thought a lot about how I could make a blog that is only accessible to people I know, without actually having to vet them (or even be aware myself who accesses it). This is a curious project idea, and perhaps something I’ll explore some day. I’ve thought about using some kind of federated access that perhaps allows only my Instagram followers – that way I’ve approved them in that capacity. We’ll see. It would be nice to be able to write to that audience specifically, since I could be a little more open about my life.
Climbing the Ladder#
Yesterday I got promoted, along with a raise and a nice bonus. It was a part of a team-wide (and likely even more broad) action on performance evaluations. I’m now a software engineer II, which I think is essentially like a senior position, but not a team lead or staff engineer. I think I have earned this step in my career. I’ve worked for a long time to grow as a dev and as a teammate. I put a lot of time and effort into team culture and helping others, too. I’m proud of myself.
Personal Projects#
I have been working on a Ruby on Rails project that is a simple clone of Y Combinator’s Hackernews. I have not spent as much time on it as I would like, and it is particularly hard to carve out time in the evenings after spending all day working, but I have learned a lot. I’ve learned more about the Rails framework and those conventions (although I know I have a long way to go), about Docker, and about the tradeoffs of various design choices.
For example, I opted to not make use of a database in my application (at least
for this iteration of development). This choice, in conjunction with the very
minimal HackerNews public API, has led to some performance implications.
Specifically, when I created the page to view the comments on a particular
HackerNews post, loading the comment tree is disturbingly slow. The reason for
this is that the API models most of the internal objects (like stories,
comments, etc.) as a simple item type. There is no API endpoint to get, say, a
list of items at once. So, to build the comment tree of a particular story (or
other item), I have to follow the list of references and make a new request for
each item. At the time of writing, I’m doing this semi-synchronously on the
back-end. I say semi-synchronously, because I have added code that threads
requests, but it can only thread requests for a single item’s descendants, not
all comments under a story. For HN stories that have a high volume of comments,
loading the full view takes a long time. Suffice it to say, it’s been
interesting to try to deal with and work around. In the future, I’ll add
database (and perhaps caching on top of that) support, which will make this a
non-issue. The reason I’ve not done so yet is because I don’t have the disk
space to start populating my own mirror of the HN DB, and I refuse to pay for a
3rd-party service in the context of a personal app designed to grow my knowledge
and portfolio. I do have a server I’m going to set up eventually that I could
put to work, but that’s a project and uplift for another day.
I have thought about moving the request logic to the front-end, which would probably allow me to asynchronously load components (and display them when they are available, as opposed to waiting for all the data to be ready), but this approach is also something I want to do in a later iteration of development. For now, I’m content to get a version 1.0 that is not optimal, so I can at least take solace in getting to that point.
Other Interests#
I am somewhat hesitant to bring this up, but I really see no reason not to.
While I enjoy programming and web development, it’s not exactly my deepest personal interest. I see it as more of a means to put bread on the table, and I’ve always been partial to computers. Truly, though, I often spend my free time pondering some very deep questions about nature – namely physics (reality) and the various sciences in which humanity has probed those mysteries.
To be more concrete, I think a lot about the “smallest things” – I try to imagine the foundational elements of nature as I imagine they might be. Of course, science has answers to those questions already: in physics the “smallest thing” is the quantum world, and in biology the “smallest thing” is the molecular world – DNA, RNA, and their constituent parts and interactions. When I think about these things, I imagine them as one in the same. It is no new revelation to think about the fact that genetics/genomics are ultimately governed by physics, and in particular quantum mechanics (as we know things now).
For this reason, I often think about the relationships between the two, and wonder about how we could develop new perspectives to understand them more intimately. Something that struck me a while ago (a few years now), is the significance of palindromes in DNA/RNA. When I learned about the definition of CRISPR, I couldn’t help but wonder in awe at the fact that we’re able to manufacture proteins by hijacking palindromic repeats in genetic sequences. Certainly, the details are far more complicated than I’m equipped or qualified to understand, but my fascination with palindromes has not waivered in the last four years. A geneticist would look at this technology that leverages palindromes in DNA and say “Sure, of course we can do that and of course palindromes are pervasive in DNA – there are only four letters!” but I suspect their significance and presence there might be even more meaningful than we initially imagine. Allow me to marvel for a moment.
DNA and RNA comprise the symbolic language of life. Somehow, out of their structure and function, we, sentient, self-aware and knowledgeable beings, emerge. There is no “coincidence” to this. There is only immense meaningfullness, and each part of that system is necessary for the human mind to exist. Moreover, palindromes are deceivingly simple objects that possess characteristics that I argue nature really “likes” (yes, I am imposing some will onto nature here, sue me). For example, in physics (particularly quantum mechanics), symmetries of objects are of utmost importance. One of the most successful arenas of mathematics, group theory, is also concerned with symmetries almost exclusively. The palindrome is a linear, symmetric object. I suspect that its properties are considerably more important to genetics than we might imagine right now. Moreover, it appears that palindromes must be considered in a binary fashion: there are even length and odd length palindromes, and their structure separates them into two distinct subtypes. Binary systems are powerful and ubiquitous in logic, computing, mathematics, etc.
Now, I have no real evidence to offer, other than the material that has been created by many highly qualified scientists already, and no certifications to stand on. I am simply a curious man that tries to think outside the box. Perhaps someday I’ll be able to formulate real arguments and hypotheses to put to the test. I would like to challenge myself to spend more time investigating these thoughts and maybe someday will write about them in more detail.
Thanks for reading, and take care, my entangled friend.