You’ve got some existing code and you might want to make it faster. How hard is it to make it faster? How do you go about it? What tools do you need? Is it even worth doing?

I love the Visual Studio C# Performance Profiler, and am shocked to find out how many engineers around me haven’t used it before. It’s very easy to quickly check the performance of your code and you’d be amazed how often there are significant performance bottlenecks there that are very easy to fix.

After two years of minimal travel, we decided to fly to New York City, and I promptly got COVID while there. Our return turned into a surprise COVID road trip; this is the story.

For most of my life, I’ve bought clothes on sale which seemed “good enough”. My outerwear lasts a really long time, though. As a few favorites finally wore out, I decided that I should really just get exactly what I want and get rid of the rest. With that, my quest for some perfect sweaters began.

I recently started using an M1 MacBook Pro 14". I wanted to know which of my cables and chargers work with it and how fast it charges from them. My previous laptop, an ASUS Zephyrus G14, only charges from 20v (60w+) USB-C chargers, so I was expecting the same. I was shocked to find out that the MacBook will charge...

I’ve been using FFMPEG to transcode gaming videos often lately, and I find the reference documentation confusing.

I love the tower defense game Kingdom Rush. More than anything else, it has just the right amount of complexity - just enough towers and abilities to give you options, and just enough tactical play to keep you busy between build steps. The difficulty rises smoothly across the levels, slowly asking more of you as you improve. It’s great fun...

Today I’m releasing a new version of Regex Builder, 14 years after the previous release, thanks to an email from a fan. Regular Expressions (regexes) are a powerful way to search text, but also hard to write and very hard to debug, kind of like SQL queries. I wrote Regex Builder originally around 2004 (!!) to help me...

I’ve been updating my backpacking loadout and learning from the “ultralight” backpacking community. I was struck by the parallels between backpack-packing and budgeting and how backpacking wisdom can apply to finance.

My Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 battery ran out on the first day by 4:00pm, and I was pretty disappointed. After a few device resets and a lot of measurements, however, my watch is now using only about a third of the battery per full 24 hour day. Here’s what I learned.