I’ve been in Boise all month! I’m enjoying my team here - I’ll make sure to write about my time here after I return home to California. This month, I’ve been really motivated to write - I’ve published 5 blogposts! Hopefully the habit sticks.

At work, I’m devoting about half my time to recruiting. Running several interviews a day is pretty stressful for an introvert like me. If you are or know a software engineer looking for work, help me out by checking out our job description here!

This post dives deep into a scary data loss scenario - we’ll cover identifying the data loss, investigating the root cause, and finally recovering the data.

This bug affected Readwise users who exported their highlights (both manually & automatically) to Roam on 10/27. If you are one of those users, you should contact Roam support & use my recovery code ASAP!

One piece of unattributed wisdom that’s stuck with me is “don’t take more than one technology bet”. At Ladder, our big bet is using Clojure for fullstack app development. Ladder’s used Clojure since day 1 in 2015, and we wouldn’t want it any different! In particular, Clojure’s Lisp heritage, focus on pure functions and immutable data structures, unified client-server support, and superior developer experience have helped us write higher quality code faster.

Ladder is hiring! If you’re interested, please check out our job description here!

It’s election time! I like to arguetalk about politics, and friends have told me that they don’t always know what I actually believe. I thought I’d share my ballot to put my money where my mouth is! While I’m in Boise this month, I’m registered to vote in Dublin, California.

According to this political compass site, I lean economic-left, social-libertarian:

I identify most closely with the Democratic party - if forced to choose based solely on party affiliation, I’ll take the Democrats every time.

Scott Alexander of Slatestarcodex fame makes a compelling argument against California propositions, so, like him, I have an initial bias towards voting “No” on propositions.

This election cycle, I care most about:

• A return to political normalcy. Over the last decade, politics has grown increasingly partisan - which may be a rational strategy.
• Effective COVID response:
  • We should have national guidelines backed by science, but policymaking should reside with state & local authorities who can respond more effectively. This is the whole point of federalism!
  • We need continuing economic stimulus - of course pumping money into the economy isn’t ideal, but desperate times call for desperate measures. We should be primarily focused on short-term recovery.

Now, on to my ballot!

In Boise, gyms are open! I visited Axiom Fitness the other morning. The facility was great, but I was pretty uncomfortable with the maskless environment. Below, I estimate my risk of catching COVID from a single gym session, and find that my risk of catching COVID from a single gym session is ~0.03%. With ~10 gym sessions remaining in my time in Idaho, my total risk of catching COVID specifically from the gym is 1 - (1 - risk_per_session)^10 = 0.003037839182, or about 0.3%. This is well within my personal risk tolerance, so I decided to buy a single-month pass!

This page is interactive: try estimating risk for your own gym sessions!