Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

I didn’t realize it had a name until I looked it up, but a Rubin vase is a famous optical illusion. It’s the one where you first see two faces looking at one another, and then realize it can instead be seen as a vase. You might have had it the other way around.

That one is well known enough that you probably already know to look for its “second” image. There ...

If I’m measuring water into a marked cup, I slow down as I’m nearing the mark because I don’t want to overshoot it. I bet you do that too. I can pour quickly at first, but as I near the line, I’ll decide I need to be more precise. I slow the rate so I can control it more. If I poured it all at full speed, I’d almost certainly stop too early or too late. Even if it’s okay to b...

I was planning to build a tiny storage shed for my small backyard. Part of me wanted to jump in and start framing right away, but lumber is expensive and I could imagine wasting it.

Being wood, the structure could easily become too heavy to move. I might need access to the wall behind it, so I wanted to keep the framing minimal. But then it also needed to support the ...

During a legacy data migration, imported images kept rendering as broken files. Everything looked fine in the logs. No errors, no warnings. It took me some back and forth to finally discover that TDS was quietly truncating varbinary(max) columns on the way out. One SQL command fixed it.

TDS (Tabular Data Stream) is the prot...

You know the feeling. You run bundle exec rspec and instead of a clean wall of dots, you get this: