roguelazer's website

As you may or may not know, today is the day before the most contentious election in recent memory. Aside from the presidential race between a competent woman and a can of orange spray paint, there are also a host of down-ballot candidates at the federal, state, and local levels, and, here in San Francisco, an outstanding 42 state, regional, and city ballot propositions. As is usual, I've received a healthy pile of 77 pieces of election spam this season; here's my tally.

Overall, of the 77 pieces of mail that my wife and I received in the months leading up to this election, 15 of them were voting slates and 62 of them were either single-issue or, in many cases, dual-issue (U & P, Q & R). As far as I can tell, only a single one of them (the state-issued party-level official endorsements) even touched on the presidential campaign. Read on for details!

Hello readers! If you've been living under a rock (or, really, anywhere that isn't California), this coming Tuesday (June 7th) is the most important primary election in California in recent memory! As befits such a momentous occasion, I've received another batch of election spam!¹

Surprisingly, the biggest issue in this election in San Francisco isn't the presidential primary, but is instead the election of the Democratic County Central Committee (the DCCC); the vast majority of election spam that I received was either a complete slate for the DCCC, or an ad for an individual candidate.

I've decided to break down my analysis a little differently this year; I'll be counting each piece of mail separately for each issue it advertises for; therefore, the sums don't necessarily add up to the total amount of mail (42 pieces, if you're curious).

Beyond that, 15 of the flyers contained complete DCCC slates, most of which were either the Reform Slate or the Progressive Slate. A decent overview of the slates can be found at https://medium.com/@understanding_sf_politics/the-2016-san-francisco-dccc-elections-c0f6fc84537d.

And, of course, we always have a bunch of ballot propositions. Here are the tallies:

Using my estimate from last time of 35¢ per piece of mail, that's $14.70 spent advertising for this local primary election to my household alone. What an efficient use of money!

Anyhow, if you live in California, be sure to vote on Tuesday. I'm sure I'll see you again for another of these tallies in November.

Most of the work done in actual programming jobs is taking structured data in some particular format from one system, slightly tweaking it, and sending it off to some other system. When exchanging data between different processes, it's almost always necessary to serialize it into a series of bytes which can be sent across a dumb byte-oriented transport (such as TCP). There are hundreds upon hundreds of different serialization formats out there, but I just wanted to talk about a few of the most common that folks use with the Python programming language.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about the election spam that I'd gotten. I figured that since voting had begun, the flow of ads would taper off. Boy was I wrong! Here's my current count:

In addition to all of this paper spam, I now get between one and four phone calls a day from supporters of various candidates (and, in one case, from a candidate themselves). And three times now, I've caught campaigners tailgating into my apartment building to annoy people door-to-door.

Here's the list of distinct organizations I've gotten voting voting slates from so far:

• San Francisco Tenant's Union
• Alice B Toklas Democratic Club
• Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club
• San Francisco Young Democrats Club
• Affordable Housing Alliance
• San Francisco Democratic County Central Committee
• Sierra Club
• FDR Democratic Club
• District 3 Democrats Club
• Affordable Future for San Francisco PAC / Jane Kim

Most of these have sent three or four different ads with the same slate but different artwork or highlighting different issues.

Augh.

At least there are only two more days.

You may or may not know this, but 2015 is shaping up to be a big election year in San Francisco. Yes, it's an off-year. Yes, there are "only" nine propositions on the ballot. Nonetheless, if you believe the rhetoric, this is the year that's going to make it or break it for the city of San Francisco. How do I know all this? It's because I read through all 46 pieces of printed advertising that I've received so far this season.

In February, I Kickstarted the Pebble Time. As soon as it was announced (March 3), I upgraded my Kickstarter pledge to the Pebble Time Steel. As you might remember from last year, I had Kickstarted the original Pebble ("Pebble Classic" now) and purchased the Pebble Steel as soon as it was released, so this was a no-brainer.

Well, it took a few months longer than expected, but my Time Steel arrived about a week ago, and here's my review.

As most of you probably know, I got married last month! The wedding was in Claremont and went great, and it's probably worth a post of its own; however, what I've come to write for you is a description of what followed — our honeymoon in France. We visited Paris, Beaune (in Burgundy), Avignon (in the Southern Rhône Valley), and Saint-Raphaël (in Côte d'Azur). Read on for more pictures and anecdotes than you could've ever asked for!

Here are two things about me that some people don't know:

1. I like e-mail. I mean, nobody looks forward to going through 700 e-mails every morning (which is about how many I get that I have to at least glance at), but it's far better than 700 meetings, 700 HipChats, 700 Slack messages, or anything else that requires synchronous attention. I'm all about being able to asynchronously "serially multitask", and being able to route everything through the dumb but asynchronous pipe of email makes that a lot easier. People who try to sell you on an e-mail-less office in favor of instant messaging tools are people who hate your productivity.
2. I despise Gmail. I hate that most of the features only work in the awful web interface. I hate that the offline features of the mobile app only sort of work, and the web app hasn't been usable offline since Google Gears shut down. I hate that the IMAP server will sometimes turn off for 10 or 15 minutes and doesn't properly support the SEARCH command. Unfortunately, tech companies seem to exclusively use either Gmail or Outlook/Exchange, and Exchange is even worse than Gmail.

As you might expect given the intersection of those two facts, I have a pretty unusual mail setup. So I thought I'd share it on the Internet!

We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

We spend a lot of our time in the modern, web services-driven technology industry ignoring performance issues. What's the point of micro-optimizing a 3ms function call when each request spends 8 or 9 seconds inside the SQLAlchemy ORM? Well, sometimes it's nice to practice those optimizion skills anyway, and today I'm going to walk you through micro-optimizing a simple problem and we'll see just how much better we can do than a naive solution... even though we probably normally shouldn't.

Until recently, my job was to synthesize a deep understanding of operating systems, networking, system administration, and my company's application and to use that synthesis to fix our existing systems and design better ones. A lot of folks in the technology industry (particularly in the bubble of Greater San Francisco) use the word "DevOps" when putting out job postings for roughly those tasks, and I just wanted to briefly write about why this word is somewhere between inaccurate and offensive and why you shouldn't use it.