The Powerlifter’s Arsenal: Leveling Up

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With the basics, the key is to stay simple and cheap. As with all hobbies, it makes little sense to invest heavily in equipment until you’re consistent, and know you’re sticking with it for the long haul. Once you near intermediate level, you likely will not achieve significant leaps in progress through improving your form, so now is the time to buy your way to new PRs. Chalk It Up Certainly not a significant expense, gym chalk still seems best reserved for more experienced lifters, who lift at a gym that even allows the use at all. Likely when you first start, your grip strength is the least of your concerns, so there is little need to deal with the hassle and mess of chalking up for your lifts. Once you’re pushing the limits of [Read more...]

The Powerlifter’s Arsenal: The Starter Pack

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When I first started lifting, I’d see giant dudes at the gym lugging comically large duffel bags, filled with who-knows-what, and would wonder how anyone thought all of that stuff was necessary. Fast-forward seven years, and now I’m somehow one of those dudes. Life at the gym used to be quite simple. But as the years went on, and I worked with increasingly heavy weights, I slowly added tools to help me in my quest for strength. Just The Basics This is the first in a series of posts to document my accumulation of lifting gear, starting with the bare bones essentials to start your gym Odyssey. Notebook When you’re just starting out, the most important items to have with you at every session is a notebook and pencil. I’ve found that a [Read more...]

DroidCon NYC 2016

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Updated November 12, 2016 with available videos from touchlab This year I was lucky enough to attend DroidCon NYC, and soak up as much Android dev goodness as I could. There were a bunch of interesting talks, for a varying degree of knowledge level. Definitely something for everyone, something I can speak to, being I am very new to mobile/Android development. During the conference, I seemed to find myself in the most popular talks, so when I could get a seat, I tried to take notes. I’ll compile them here so they can benefit more than just me. Understanding Performance In The Wild Delyan Kratunov Slides (PDF) As someone who has been tasked with hunting down performance issues in web apps, I have been very interested in getting more [Read more...]

Let’s Encrypt With Let’s Encrypt

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Let's Encrypt Logo

But Why? A few years back, there was a big push for HTTPS Everywhere, big enough for Google to modify their page ranking for it. over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. Considering that a big reason for me to have this blog is so I can own my search results, I decided to take some time to get that sweet green lock everyone seemed to like so much. Not only would I LOCK in my Google search superiority over the other Rami Massouds, but I would also not have to worry as much about logging into a WordPress admin over plain text!! Locking It [Read more...]

Make Emacs & $PATH Play Nice In OS X

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After setting up signing my Git commits with GPG, I realized I accidentally broke Magit!. Which is one of my favorite Emacs packages, and the best way to interact with Git. The break was caused by a seemingly common issue for Emacs users in OS X: the PATH variable as Emacs understood it was not the PATH that terminal used. Now that my Git config was telling Git to call out to the GNUPG binary to sign the commit, and it couldn’t find it. This is not exactly a new issue for me. When I started writing Ruby professionally, getting Emacs to play nicely with the right binaries in OS X, so I could use Rspec within a buffer was a challenge. A challenge that always seemed to be for another day, until I broke Magit!. Funny how killing your [Read more...]