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Wizards Don’t Do Dishes
Programming is the closest thing to magic I’ve found. But even in programming, there’s no shortage of mundane nearly-identical tasks. They accumulate like dirty dishes with dismal regularity, sapping...
View ArticleA Roadmap to Modernization
In the evolving landscape of software development, staying up-to-date with the latest technologies and best practices is not just an option; it’s a necessity. One significant question that many...
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Ironing Out Steam’s A11y Wrinkles
Steam is the biggest digital platform for PC games with 120 million monthly active users. While it is primarily a storefront for buying and playing games, games published on the store also have...
View ArticleDesign Meeting Design
Your design is only as good as your ability to communicate it. Unless you design by yourself for yourself, you must bring others into your vision. That means excellent communication as a designer is...
View ArticleShopping for a Javascript Meta-Framework
I am nearly – and only – a five year old software engineer. And I’m still enlightened and entertained by all of the new frameworks, libraries, packages, ideas that surface every week in the Javascript...
View ArticleOur Net-Zero CO2 Emissions Goal
At Simple Thread we want to do our part to fight climate change and to make our world a cleaner place by making a commitment to have Net-Zero CO2 emissions by 2050 (we plan to hit this much much...
View ArticleSimple Thread and Dominion Energy Innovation Center Celebrate Innovators at...
Simple Thread, together with the Dominion Energy Innovation Center (DEIC), an entrepreneurial hub for clean energy innovators, are thrilled to announce the winners of the inaugural Energy Tech Virginia...
View ArticleFixtures in Rails
Maybe it is time to give this old feature another chance. I’ve been working on Rails apps since early in version 3. I remember my first introduction to fixtures being tied to learning about testing via...
View ArticleThe Path for Energy Transformation: Co-Creation
Despite our best efforts, when working with clients we have yet to find a crystal ball that reveals (and deconflicts!) all of our stakeholders’ requirements, wishes, and workflows so we can instantly...
View ArticleRunning Celery 5 on Windows
This is a follow up to my previous blog post, “Windows and Legacy Python: Scaling up With Celery”. In it, I talked about how I modified an outage forecasting system to run as a distributed system...
View ArticleEnergy Tech 2024 Lights a Spark
Together with the Dominion Energy Innovation Center (DEIC), Simple Thread hosted Virginia’s first annual Energy Tech conference. The sold-out event attracted visionaries, industry leaders, and energy...
View ArticleWhat Happens to Old Software?
From BASIC to Modern Challenges The BASIC programming language recently turned 60 years old, which kind of put into perspective my own woes trying to update a roughly decade-old Rails project. I...
View ArticleThe Benefits of Mastering a Skill
This winter I brought an article about a basketball coach to my piano teacher. It was about Tara VanDerveer, who coached the Stanford University women’s basketball team for 39 years and recently became...
View ArticleThe Conversation
When I was sixteen I convinced my mom to buy me a Sony M-560V Microcassette Recorder. I pitched it as a way to listen back to myself playing drums in the school high school jazz band, but instead I...
View ArticleTied Up In Docs
An engineering team starts a new project. Work comes so thick and fast that documentation (docs) barely registers as a need. And things will be so different in six months or a year – surely it’s better...
View ArticleThe Path for Energy Transformation: Vision and Purpose
Aligning The Team When starting any project, one of the most challenging activities can be getting everyone on the same page. Maybe you’ve been there before. You’re deep in the middle of some important...
View ArticleKey Takeaways from Infocast’s Transmission & Interconnection Conference
Last week, I attended the 2024 Infocast Transmission & Interconnection conference in Arlington, VA. The event brought together experts from across the energy sector to discuss the future of grid...
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Microdosing Creativity: How a Creative Practice Can Reduce Anxiety and...
The opposite of anxiety isn’t calm, it’s creativity I recently listened to a podcast with renowned life coach, Martha Beck, and something she said about anxiety caught my attention. She said, “the...
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The Outlaw in the Era of Change
The Rise of Train Robberies In the 1890s, train robbery was a major problem in the United States. Most passenger trains included a locked and guarded express car, which was used to transport cash...
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The Philosopher King, the Demiurge and the Programmer
The relationship between the Programmer and the Program is one not often considered through the lens of metaphysics and ethics. As established in the previous piece, the Programmer is burdened by a...
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