How you write a program can have a dramatic impact on its performance. I once wrote a query against geospatial data that took several hours to complete. After searching extensively online for ways to speed it up, I discovered an optimizer hint, one tiny piece of code, that effectively reduced the time to complete from […]
Month: April 2020
Striving
There’s a popular, but good cliche in the Christian missions community: God doesn’t call the qualified, he qualifies the called. It’s led me to question the striving in my own life, the trying so hard to establish an identity. I had a country I was planning to visit this summer, but it’s thoroughly locked down […]
Waiting to Give
For the past few years, I’ve had a strong desire to do prophetic giving. That probably sounds crazy to a lot of people, but it basically means praying to God for what to buy, then going out and praying to find the people who should receive those things. I feel like I’ve heard stories of […]
How to Win with Homeownership
It’s no secret that I’m not a huge fan of homeownership. I’ve detailed this before, and I’ll detail it again. But that doesn’t mean I believe homeownership, in itself, is wrong or bad. In fact, you could say my frustration is more with the blind importance, status, and reverence which American culture confers upon homeownership, […]
The Economics of Programming
It’s commonly known that if you want to be a software developer, you have to stay up to date with the latest technologies. What often isn’t explained is what this even means, since there are now a tremendous number of specializations within software development. It makes no sense to keep up with everything since 1) […]
Being Good Enough
In middle school, our band had a number of slackers, most of whom were in percussion. It was, after all, a time of trying subjects out and discovering strengths and weaknesses, and I think it was common for a lot of people to want to try their hands at drums and guitar. One particular percussionist […]