jherskovic

Location: Seattle, WA

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Django, Postgresql, MS SQL Server, R, Ansible, C (rusty!), JavaScript, Claude Code, PowerBI, Tableau, Linux

Résumé/CV: Technology leader and software builder. Lead a 10+ person team focused on applying data science and AI to modern academic medicine. 20+ years of coding experience, 20+ years database/DBA experience. 10+ of hands-on leadership experience of high-performing teams. Secret superpower: I'm a physician, I've been an academic, I understand what makes healthcare providers tick. Haven't practiced in a very long time.

Email: j@herko.me

I have this, on Tahoe, and tracked it to Zoom. Still have no clue WHY, but it appears when I join a meeting and stays until I disconnect. It’s very annoying.

Python has some absolutely kick-ass libraries, even without C. It has Django, for those of us who like developing web apps but never could fall in love with Ruby on Rails. And Django is amazing. I've also yet to see a better language for writing quick ETL scripts and pipelines. Also, an 'I need a script for $SYSADMIN_TASK but I want to be able to read it later.' Anything dominated by external latencies (web, databases, etc) will be fast enough for many uses in Python.

Sure, it's not a language to write a web browser or game engine in. And it is slow. But it has some very strong niches outside of ML/Data science. Personally, I love it. To each their own.

On the other end of the spectrum, today I needed to build a complicated piece of software on x86-64 Linux and all I have handy are ARM Macs. One qemu later, I have an 8-core “PC” building merrily. It won’t win speed records, but it’s entirely usable.

Go look at the editorial policy from Ars. Lee just writes like that; it's his style, it always has been.

This keeps getting posted and is not true. Rosetta is still present and working. It throws a deprecation warning notice but otherwise runs fine.

It's macOS 28 that will no longer run x86_64 apps, although games are exempt. Rosetta is basically going game only at that point. They haven't announced how long it will keep working in this capacity.

Have a TrueNAS server at home with a bunch of drives in a RAID-Z array. Backups go there. My pictures, which are probably my single most important item, are also there but get cross-backed up to a very good friend’s NAS in a different city. And his to mine.

My wife’s backups also go on BackBlaze because she would be much, much, much less tolerant of a local glitch than I would.

TL;DR local-first backups here. Time Machine makes it trivial except when it falls on it face and has to start over. Highly recommended if you can put up with replacing a hard drive every few years.

Just give them all ACME catalogs and watch the problem solve itself.

I do this same thing too when building archives in macOS I will unpack on Linux later.

I use FontAwesome. I bought FontAwesome subscriptions for my team. Love the product.

“We released new icons” (or a new version) is a message that has exactly zero information content for me. My workflow is “I need an icon for this,” so I open FA’s site and search. Done. Remembering that I searched for an icon that wasn’t there months ago, so that I’ll go check and see if it’s in the new release? Not going to happen.

No shade here. If you live, breathe, and devote your life to your product you’re going to be orders of magnitude more excited and attuned than the rest of us. Just… remember that we do not care to the level that you do. We buy it to be a tool in our toolkit, not the center of our lives.

If Ryobi sent me an email whenever they added a new battery-powered tool to their catalog, or upgraded a drill, I’d lose my shit. My time and attention are valuable to me. Don’t take them for granted.

So many naysayers. I love it! So what if it doesn’t come from the Brut region of France and thus it’s just sparkling cement, it looks great and is clearly a labor of love.

First line of the readme: Non-functional implementation work-in-progress framework code for getting HDR10 working under X11.

Love my APP3, upgraded from APP2 and have only one regret... no Comply Foam tips available yet. Why does Apple not go all-in on memory foam, I dunno, but at least the APP2 version was so much better it's not even funny.

With the Apple XS tips, which otherwise fit well for me, any yawn means the APP3 fall out.

I was affected as well. My IAH->SEA 7:10 PM Central flight took off 4 hours late. It’s 4 AM central and we’re just descending to land in Seattle. Communication from the airline was basically nonexistent and the poor ground crews didn’t get any information either. I thought we wouldn’t even take off because of crew time limits, but we were lucky to have a fresh one. The system apparently came back and died several times before we could take off. We pushed away from the gate because the system was working and then had to wait on the tarmac for an hour because the system was down again. Not a fun day for air travelers.

I use Safari (admittedly, with Private Cloud and a few tracking-blocking extensions) and get bombarded with Cloudflare's 'prove you are human' checkbox several times an hour.

It's already a pretty degraded experience.

The website generally looks good, but the font in the headings is weird. What is up with the "d" in it?!

Looks like the end boss of yak shaving. Very fun, silly idea and a great implementation.

Oh, man, Christian, are you going to do Discord next? Because it’d fit the pattern to a T.

(This is a joke)

I was a huge fan of Apollo and genuinely appreciate your UX design and aesthetic chops. Please make something 100% your own next time! You have the name recognition and development experience to pull it off.

I can’t wait to see what you do next. Just… please not another client for someone else’s service.

I was there a few weeks ago! I had always wanted to visit, so it was a bucket list item for me and I absolutely loved it. The conditions in which people worked tirelessly while trying to eke out a bit of a normal life in between were so interesting.

I am kicking myself that I couldn't stop at the Museum of Computing, but the family was jetlagged and really tired. Regardless of that, I considered Bletchley Park time well spent and an awesome visit.

No parole in the Federal system. There's (some) time off for good behavior.

I was a big Tableau champion at our org. Lots of dashboards, led a user group, was the go-to expert for a while (think 10 years ago). For us, what killed it was the pricing. They got very greedy very fast. Justifying a 4-digit license, per desktop, was the real killer. We just couldn’t, so the creation of dashboards became a tool of a “priesthood” of sorts. Everyone loved the way the dashboards looked and performed, but people very, very rarely used them. After years trying, I can remember ONE decision that was sorta-adopted based on a dataviz.

PowerBI are their lunch because it was “free” with the rest of our Microsoft stuff, so everyone could make the shiny dashboards no one uses instead of just a few.

In some cases we just wrote our own d3-based visualizations. It was easier than dealing with the constant licensing headaches Tableau brought.

It's better-than-free money. The 0% interest rate means, accounting for inflation, you're getting paid to use Apple's money instead of your own.

I can afford the lump sum, but it's a lot nicer to smooth out the cash flow using Apple's money instead of mine. As long as you're responsible, what's the harm?

Allow me to quote myself

"Even for a technological tour de force, 5K is a lot of dough. If I used it, and loved it, I’d keep it. But for discomfort, actual eye pain, looking through a periscope, and the inevitable resulting gathering-dust-in-a-corner? I’m not insane. It has to go back. I’m an early adopter, but not a throw-away-5-kilodollars early adopter."

Not all problems become evident in a carefully-curated demo at a well-lit store, either.

OP here. What the sibling comment said. The built-in speakers are fantastic, and like many other Apple enthusiasts I own Airpods Pro already as well if I need isolation.

OP here. I mean the passthrough cameras, and I mean they suck compared to the expectation of this being "AR, but rendered in VR" (I also have a 'first impressions' post that goes into more detail on this).

They're definitely not as good as the cameras on my iPhone, either.

OP here. I own a Quest 2 as well. It's a toy compared to the AVP, but it is more comfortable. I agree with your impression - these things will get addressed, but not within the return window, and a $5K gamble that it'll become useful is too rich for my taste.

I deeply disagree with the author. Costs are predictable from one year to the next, true; but you are beholden to the vendor, and the vendor may even effectively hold your data hostage.

Vendors can and do get greedy, and if you're deeply integrated with them then untangling those integrations and migrating elsewhere becomes a big job in and of itself. I've had my share of experiences where enterprise SaaS vendors try to squeeze their customers after they effectively become a single source.

I am not at all opposed to SaaS, and use it at my organization quite effectively. But you have to choose carefully. In many cases, the vendor will become a partner, and it can become a pretty abusive partnership.

On the other hand, when you own it, at least you KNOW you own it.

And this isn't even taking into account the quality of the product itself. We have vendors that, like others complain here, just delight in changing UIs and offered functionality left and right, deprecating APIs with two months' notice. We have others who behave like grownups.

I will admit to implementing `__getattr__` and `__setattr__` in such a way that they mimic object properties in dictionaries, for specific cases. In general, the threshold for doing so should be IMHO fairly high. In my case, - they are data-heavy classes but not @dataclass classes, and - there's enough attribute access that the `["` and `"]` become visually distracting, and - there are nested structures, so so you can write `x.foo.bar.baz` instead of `x["foo"]["bar"]["baz"]` This is especially useful, in our case, in a system that intakes a lot of JSON with a LOT of nested dictionaries.

It's amusing that the UUIDs are considered 'ugly' while the Amazon and YouTube IDs are not. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I don't find UUIDs pretty, at all, but the others are even uglier to my taste.

Yes, UUIDs are overkill for most applications. But CPUs and hard drives are, relatively speaking, cheap. Using an existing, battle-tested unique ID library implementation has advantages. The 8 bytes per record you're saving over bigserial is, for most use cases, negligible. 1,000,000 rows? You'll save 8 MB by switching away from UUIDs.

Most databases won't be that large. Use a UUID if you want; pretend you'll have Really Big Data some day if it makes you happy. Render it using a special function if the hyphens are too ugly.

Yup. If you have name recognition, even in a niche field, you'll be inundated with nonsensical resumes and/or desperate people. We get hundreds of applications per position, and many of them are downright nonsensical. No, we can't sponsor a visa for a developer from a different country for an entry-level analyst position. We're a hospital.