Do we have a duty to help the homeless? This is obviously a matter of opinion – if you don’t think that your money or effort should go towards helping the homeless, I doubt that anything that I say here will sway that. This was the recurring theme on the The Good Place (one of my favorite shows): “What do we owe to each other?”…
For this post I can rehash statistics and talking points, but that would be boring. Camp United We Stand is a county sanctioned homeless camp that rotates between church parking lots every three months – mostly in the Shoreline, Washington area. I have been a friend of the camp for the past 18 months, so I decided to interview a few residents to learn their…
Seattle ranks 18th in terms of population (755, 078) within the US, but it has the 3rd biggest homeless population (16,385). Chicago ranks 3rd in terms of US population (2,664,452), but ranks 13th in terms of its homeless population (6,139). Houston ranks 4th in terms of US population (2,314,157), but ranks 22nd in terms of its homeless population. What is going on here? One theory…
Myth 1: Most homeless people are mentally ill It is estimated that about 30% of the homeless population in Seattle suffers from a serious mental illness. I have encountered many homeless people that are seriously mentally ill, but most are not. I also suspect that for many this is a chicken-and-egg situation. Living on the street is filled with trauma. I suspect that even the…
I know that there have always been homeless people, but I don’t remember seeing any when I was growing up in Seattle during the 1970s. In fact, Google AI says that homelessness was such a small issue back then that it was not very well tracked. I could not even find a decent graph that went back further than 2007. But today, you see homeless…
Homelessness is a topic that has been on my mind a lot over the past few years and I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while. It is a very broad topic with lots of data, but very little understanding. A 5-minute blog post will not cover the subject, so I am planning on doing a series of posts on the topic. I…
DirectFlip is a feature which allows the DWM to: This was not particularly hard to implement, but after getting it to work I realized that we had a fundamental architectural incompatibility. To understand the issue, I must draw some timing diagrams and give a brief explanation of how display hardware works. Generally speaking, display hardware has to continually re-read the image from memory and send…
For the past several years, my wife and I have been volunteering at the shared breakfast for the homeless which is hosted by the First United Methodist Church in downtown Seattle (right next to the Pacific Science Center). We are not Methodist and we do not know much about the church (although they seem pretty chill), but we have found volunteering a very interesting experience….
While the focus of Windows 7 was to fix Windows Vista, the focus of Windows 8 was to make Windows scalable to the point where it could run on tablets and phones. This had always been one of the blind spots for Microsoft developers – we all had beefy development and test machines that were always plugged into the wall with fans to cool them….
Everybody hated Windows Vista and everybody loved Windows 7. They did not understand how one release could be so bad and next so awesome, and if we could do one awesome release, why not do that for every release? The secret is that we did not actually do much feature work in Window 7 – all feature development occurred in exactly 3 developer sprints (I…
