Colin's Notes

Over the years a lot of people have had trouble spelling my name. When I was younger I assumed they hadn’t heard the name “Colin.” It was pretty unusual where I lived. Over the past twenty years the name has become more popular but the spelling trouble hasn’t improved. It turns out these days there’s another problem: an alternative spelling. Could “Collin” really be as common as “Colin”? I didn’t believe it. [Read More]

Read and write Parquet files in Ruby with the ‘red-parquet’ gem; store data in memory with Arrow using the ‘red-arrow’ gem. [Read More]

It doesn’t get any easier, you just get faster Greg LeMond [Read More]

It’s been nearly twenty-eight years since the release of Turbo Pascal 6.0 on October 4 1990. Sometimes it feels to me like the evolution of programming languages and development environments has been a down hill slide ever since. [Read More]

Introduction [Read More]

Managing a House Renovation as an Agile Software Project [Read More]

Have you ever come to the realization that, looking back, you were in the right place and time to have gotten on board with the next big thing but instead badly missed the boat? It’s a familiar feeling to many software developers, maybe especially those of us who started in the nineties or earlier. Lots of successful products were developed and sold by very small teams or a single person, so the belief that “I could have done that” isn’t too delusional, given you had decent skills and energy. [Read More]

Using IPUMS Data and SQL to Constructively Speculate on Alternate History [Read More]

Update: Adjusted numbers in last case study to reflect actual earnings and expenses, corrected an error in a calculation. [Read More]

How do you know if you’re making money on your rental property? How can you estimate if a potential deal will make you money? Here are three methods in order of complexity: [Read More]