Essay

My Thoughts on Tipping Delivery Drivers

In recent months, the proliferation of tipping has been getting a lot of attention. Most recently, there has been debate regarding flight attendants having to compete for tips. It spurred this opinion piece. As I sit here two hours after placing my Grubhub order

About 8 years ago, there was a proliferation of websites featuring short anecdotes punctuated by an acronym. You may remember TFLN and FML. It turns out that the popularity of these sites is what inspired the first iteration of TFM–Total Frat

Is Forced Redirection of New Tabs Ethical?

Whenever I eat lunch near a computer, which usually happens every day, I open a new browser window with all of my favorite news sites pre-loaded. During a short lunch period, I cram in as much information and as much food

I spend a lot of time online shopping. I’ve encountered a bevy of payment systems, each with its own quirks. By now, though, payment and checkout processes are overwhelmingly fluid and user-friendly. For more than a year, I’ve been involved with

Twenty years ago, I started preschool at Prescott Elementary School in Scranton, Pennsylvania. It was a classic upbringing in a blue-collar neighborhood. It was simpler. Math was math, kids were kids, there was no air conditioning, and corporal punishment was

Recently, I found myself on the Wikipedia page for Memcached, a popular distributed object caching system. It turns out that the open-source project was developed by the guy who created LiveJournal. LiveJournal is a blogging site that started in 1999,

GeeksForGeeks is a Computer Science portal based in India. It’s hard not to end up on the site while searching for answers to interview questions. It’s a sprawling repository for everything related to programming, but especially for topics commonly tested in the fabled “Coding Interview.”

The Flaws of Low-Cost Mutual Fund Providers

I’m a big fan of low-cost mutual funds and the firms that peddle them. Firms like Vanguard have changed the game and helped people from all walks of life reach their financial goals more quickly and with less fine print.

Notes: This is an article that I wrote, almost entirely, in February 2018. I never published it. I found it two and a half years later and basically published it as-is. This week’s New York Times exposé–The Follower Factory–has brought a renewed

If you spend enough time on the internet and enough time pondering ways to make money, you’ll become aware of freelancing. More specifically elancing, though I’ll use the terms interchangeably. Elancing is the practice of performing freelance work that is usually both