Colin's Notes

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]

The recent paper The Total Rate of Return on Everything 1870-2015 has some intriguing findings on housing as an asset class: Returns were approximately the same as stocks with less risk. [Read More]

The last time I made any real use of my tape deck was 1997, and while I played the occasional CD as recently as a decade ago, that was only because I had a player that decoded my MP3 mix CDs. 600 megabytes of MP3s goes a long, long way. [Read More]

Applying the Entity System design to the IPUMS DCP (Data Conversion Program) could improve performance as well as provide new insights into the underlying problem space. [Read More]

The following glossary should help decode terms used in IPUMS documentation and source code, as well as discussions to follow on this blog. [Read More]

If you’ve ever written games, especially ones with many types of “pieces” or needed high-performance, you may have stumbled into some variety of the ECS architecture or half-discovered it by yourself. [Read More]

Here’s a possibly half-baked post on software design. In the end, I’m not sure I have anything more to say than “don’t turn off your brain.” [Read More]