ABOUT
Kelly Norton is a software engineer living in Surf City, North Carolina. He holds degrees
from Georgia Tech's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and from the MIT Media Lab
where he studied under John Maeda. From 2006–2012, he was a software engineer at Google
working on Google Web Toolkit, Speed Tracer, Google Chrome and other stuff. He co-founded
Connexxia LLC in 2000 to help universities effectively recruit high school seniors through
online social engagement. He was co-founder at FullStory.
He worked on product search at Etsy.
Now he is a Principal Software Engineer at MailChimp.
JOURNAL
About 5 or 6 years ago, I decided to form better sleep habits. Included in that was a committment to try to sleep for at least 8 hours every night. It is a committment I struggled with for quite some time. In recent years, though, I seem to have adapted to a more consistent sleep schedule. I'm also fortunate that activity trackers, like my Garmin watch, are able to record sleep related data each night. In this post, I export all of my 2019 sleep data from Garmin Connect and use it to determine how well I'm sleeping and what else I might do to sleep better in 2020.
The only paper periodical that is still delivered to my house is MIT’s Technology Review. In the back of every issue, there is a section called Puzzle Corner. The column consists of densely packed reader-submitted math puzzles and solutions to puzzles published in earlier editions. Recently, I enticed my daughter, Zoe, into solving one of the problems with me. This is a summary of our adventure.
We recently solved the mystery behind a pattern of failures that have been happening very infrequently over a long period of time. The culprit turned out to be a very suprising bug in PHP's MySQL driver, so I thought it might be worthy of a public blog post.
I read on the Internet that the beard trend is over. That's great news because I'm not trendy and I decided to stop shaving at the beginning of the year. I made it a few weeks without arousing any suspicion that I intended to keep the beard, but now it's time time decide: do I s(h)ave the beard?