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!

I bought a Freelap BT112 kit earlier this year. Now, I use it for almost every track workout - it’s great for getting instant feedback on every single rep. That said, I had some trouble getting my Freelap to consistently record times. Some of my initial workouts recorded less than 50% of my reps! Here are some tricks I’ve picked up to get all of my times recorded accurately:

I’m going to Idaho for the month of October! The Bay Area feels disconnected in its COVID response from the rest of the country - I’m excited to find out if that’s true.

This month, I set some huge gym PRs & ran my last time trial of the track season. With the offseason upon me, I’m ready to start a strength & explosiveness block in the weight room.