Friday This was my first conference and it was an amazing experience!
Continuous Integration and Deployment with Gitlab or Jenkins - Aleksey Tsalolikhin My first conference event was a workshop on hosting your own Gitlab server and setting up CI and CD with a Gitlab runner.
We explored using Gitlab to build, test, and deploy to both a staging and production environment.
As soon as I heard there were prizes for being the first to finish, I dived in and leveraged my prior experience setting up a Gitlab runner to earn… a small bag of Sour Patch kids.
Notes on the fully updated 10th edition of Bogle's Common Sense on Mutual Funds
On Investment Stategy Link to book
On Long-Term Investing Bogle refers to Wharton’s Professor Siegel’s research from Stocks for the Long Run on US stock and bond returns between 1802 and the present (2010).
“Stocks grew at a real rate of 7 percent annually; bonds, at a rate of 3.5 percent.” (10)
Stock returns were actually around 7 percent for all three major periods in US history(from industrialization, 1802-1870, globalization, 1872-1925, and the modern stock market, 1926-1999).
Takeways from John C. Bogle's 2008 book - lessons from the greatest investor of all time and inventor of index funds
Here are my notes from reading the greatest book I have read outside of the Bible. This is a poor substitute for reading the entire book, which truly is thought-provoking and valuable but hopefully my summary and thoughts can provide a fraction (perhaps even one basis point) of the value of the contents of this book.
Introduction - How the GOAT mutual fund came to be John Bogle started work at the Wellington Fund after graduating from Princeton where in his senior thesis, he wrote mutual funds “may make no claim to superiority over the market averages”.
Lessons from 25 days of frantic midnight programming
Thoughts and Takeaways This was a great challenge and I’m super glad that I lucked into the top 100 the first day which provided extra motivation to keep trying for points.
I’m actually pretty slow at solving tightly scoped problems compared to the rest of the world. My highest rank was rank 26 on the second part of the 16th day and the most points I scored was on the last challenge which was a good ending.
Maze of Twisty Trampolines and Memory Reallocation - PyPy optimizations?
Day 5 Day 5 Part 1 --- Day 5: A Maze of Twisty Trampolines, All Alike --- An urgent interrupt arrives from the CPU: it's trapped in a maze of jump instructions, and it would like assistance from any programs with spare cycles to help find the exit. The message includes a list of the offsets for each jump. Jumps are relative: -1 moves to the previous instruction, and 2 skips the next one.
Day 3 After scoring some points on Day 1 and being humbled in Day 2, I was hyped to get into Day 3 of the Advent of Code.
Day 3 Part 1 --- Day 3: Spiral Memory --- You come across an experimental new kind of memory stored on an infinite two-dimensional grid. Each square on the grid is allocated in a spiral pattern starting at a location marked 1 and then counting up while spiraling outward.
Many Hugo themes come with built in Disqus support since Hugo has a built-in Disqus partial. According to Wikipedia, “Disqus is a worldwide blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities that use a networked platform.” However, adding Disqus to your site also allows them to use third-party ad-tracking which they do to collect user data and monetize it. We will have no such evil on this site!
After achieving my goal of getting at least one point by placing in the top 100 finishers at some point on Day 1, I was psyched for Day 2.
In addition, this time I was at home where I got to use a monitor and my Kinesis Advantage keyboard.
Part 1 --- Day 2: Corruption Checksum --- As you walk through the door, a glowing humanoid shape yells in your direction.
Lessons from my first attempt at the Advent of Code challenge
Advent of Code is an online coding competition that has been going on since 2015. My co-workers participated last year to learn Elixir and other languages (Clojure, Haskell, etc.).
This is my first online coding competition. My goal was to get at least 1 point which required me to be one of the first 100 finishers on one of the 25 days.
According to the founder’s Twitter page, there are over 100,000 users so it will be no walk in the park.
Getting a 100 Google Pagespeed score without a CDN or a server
This blog is currently hosted on Gitlab Pages using Hugo.
Problem So after I set up my site, which I documented here, I went over to Google Pagespeed Insights to check the score. For mobile, they gave me a 69⁄100, which I was not happy with. Although this might have been a premature optimizations, I’ve been sold on the learning opportunity of practicing micro-optimizations. Thus, began my quest to achieve that 100⁄100.