things i think about while powerwashing 90

Shortcut to anonymous subscriber submission link: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

Hey guys!

Not much writing going on this week — been a little busy with life outside of this blog (shocking, right) and been preparing to go traveling next week! Fear not — I will be back in time to write next week's edition.

Well it's Friday night and maybe I do have a little energy to write about stuff. As some of you know, I am the maintainer and developer of the Purdue salary guide!. It's been written and rewritten twice now — once when I was a freshman and the second time when I was a junior in college. And now, a third rewrite awaits using the newest technology and frameworks in order to support some new features that'll elevate it from glorified spreadsheet on website.

But the rewrite has also reminded me about my past limitations as a programmer and how I've grown to enjoy frontend work and learned to be more expressive. The original interface was really pieced together using HTML and spit, the junior year rewrite while kind of smooth is super heavy and definitely duck-taped together in parts of the frontend. And all along I felt like I lacked control and was definitely fighting against the language to even get the simplest things done (display 16,000 records in a table).

This year, I definitely feel like I'm in the driver's seat. We've come a long way from Flask/Jinja templates then to create-react-app (WHICH GOT DEPRECATED AT SOME POINT AND IS WHY I HAD TO REWRITE THE GOD DAMN THING). We're in weird frameworks like Next.JS or Gatsby or I don't even know. But as long as there's people out there using this service, I'm definitely motivated to keep updating it.

Oh yeah here are the stats from the past week too.

anonymous subscriber news

MORE SUBMISSIONS.

Submit here: https://forms.gle/2MABf8jNr2V8kEY87

• anonymous subscriber's dreams came true. had crumbl cookie
• anonymous subscriber went to Southeast Asia and did not sweat for 10 minutes

our southeast asia correspondent checks in

Our man on the ground in Singapore, child of the buckeye and most importantly esteemed subscriber Stephen Davis checks in with some photos and a few tidbits to report back. Also he doesn't have Instagram so this is the closest anyone is gonna get to social media from Stephen.

• I am the only white person here, the food is good, train is clean and state sponsored radio goes hard
• For the New Yorkers: they turned flushing into a communist country
• Singlish is based

And now, some images to make or break your Saturday:

animal of the week

I think there's some type of wildlife migration going on (animal experts feel free to chime in here) because recently there were a lot of whales on the California coast and this past week esteemed subscriber Ellie Wang saw a literal beach full of sea lions! I've only seen this concentration of sea lions on Pier 39 — I'd definitely prefer to see this.

Quick wikipedia facts about sea lions: they're apparently intelligent, the sea lions pictured here are specifically the California sea lion and are one of six species of sea lions in the world, and they are apparently NOT even close to being endangered and Oregon and Washington engage in annual kill quotas of the California sea lion to protect fish populations.

Send me your animals at ryan@torrtle.co!