Albus the Dog, October 2020 Six months into the pandemic, our neighborhood in San Francisco had gone from its vibrant self — funky shops, dynamite coffee, a well-known Greek salad place, a patch of sunny greenspace — to a dispiriting bummer. The shops were boarded up. The hustle and bustle was gone. The Walgreens on…

Every time I come down with a case of the common cold, I invariably find myself, a few days in, when I’ve resorted to various folk remedies (hot water with lemon, hot water with salt, hot water with 1000mg of artificially-orange-flavored vitamin C from a foil packet), straining, and failing…

If you’re regularly writing SQL, Window functions will both save you time and increase readability. When to use Window functions You likely have a candidate for a window function if you find yourself either 1) creating a CTE of a table and then joining it back on itself or 2) querying the same table multiple…

On a Saturday morning in the summer of 1993 — the summer that brought us Jurassic Park, Bill Clinton’s first term, and the Waco siege — Josh Lipson brought a 25.40-second 50-meter butterfly time to the Tenby Chase Swim Club on Forge Road in Delran, New Jersey. He set the…

I found out that my Uncle Tom was dying the week before Thanksgiving. It was a Sunday. I was walking south on Laguna Street in San Francisco, on my way to my weekly Whole Foods stop which I’d begun to pride myself on completing before 9AM. It was just as…

Six months ago, I had a dull pain in my left shoulder that wouldn’t go away. After a fifty-dollar copay and twenty minutes inside of a white tube — where a superconducting electromagnet shocked the protons in my body’s water molecules into attention, imaging the armature of my shoulder —…