- journalism
- Mexico

Hot water for mother
Fermenting farm waste sounds like a pretty unappealing subject matter. But while covering it, I stumble on the makings of a powerful human story, with humor, tears, bravery and a happy ending.
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- Programming

Coarse Programmer's guide to Python's stringy bits
Strings should be easy to understand. They're just text, right? In this article I go under the hood of Python's unicode strings, and find out why I keep getting UnicodeEncodeError.
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- Programming

Coarse Programmer's guide to reactive UIs: Intercooler.js
I don't want a UI that feels like it's from 2003, but I really don't want to fiddle with a javascript framework. Intercooler.js offers a simple and somewhat coarse alternative.
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- Programming

Coarse Programmer's Guide to Scraping: Know your URLs
Scraping news websites is a research superpower... in the right hands. In the wrong hands you could end up downloading the whole internet.
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- writing
- journalism

Notes, quotes and socks
Do you feel like writing is hard? That your ideas never seem to shine on the paper like they did in your head? It's time to make writing mundane and mindless.
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- travel
- Mexico

The soul outside Merida's "artistic" center
On a torrid April midmorning, I stood with my kids in a thin sliver of shade cast by a building in Ciudad Caucel, a sprawling suburb on the western edge of Merida, Mexico. There were already several people pressed up against the building so I had to stand partly in ...