Andy Lester
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I wrote ack (@beyondgrep). I wrote "Land The Tech Job You Love" for Pragmatic Bookshelf. I like open source and helping people be happy at work.
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Articles by Andy Lester
Lester & Pitts: The Oklahoma Experiment – A model for campus free speech
Oklahoma’s claim to national leadership is open to debate in some areas, but not when it comes to protecting free speech on college campuses. In that realm, our state is unrivaled in its statewide commitment to protecting freedom of expression. Nationwide, institutions of higher education struggle with the difficult task of safeguarding free speech. Some elite schools have failed spectacularly.
Andy Lester: There's no excuse for antisemitism
"I do not condone violence, or support attacks against civilians. I do ask what you/I would do if … we were confined for 16 years in (Gaza), a blockaded area described as 'the world's largest open-air prison.'" The blood spilled that day was not dry when, on Oct. 7, 2023, a friend posted those words on a popular social media site. Hamas had just invaded Israel, murdered nearly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, engaged in widespread rape and mutilation, and took over 250 hostages back to Gaza.
ack-v3.10.0
Andy Lester / v3.10.0 (PETDANCE on 2026-06-07) v3.9.0 (PETDANCE on 2025-05-26) v3.8.2 (PETDANCE on 2025-04-06) v3.8.1 (PETDANCE on 2025-01-01) v3.8.0 (PETDANCE on 2024-12-21) v3.7.0 (PETDANCE on 2023-02-27) v3.6.0 (PETDANCE on 2022-08-21) v3.5.0 (PETDANCE on 2021-03-13) v3.4.0 (PETDANCE on 2020-06-30) v3.3.1 (PETDANCE on 2020-01-13) v3.3.0 (PETDANCE on 2019-12-28) v3.2.0 (PETDANCE on 2019-11-04) v3.1.3 (PETDANCE on 2019-10-20) v3.1.2 (PETDANCE on 2019-10-15) v3.1.1 (PETDANCE on 2019-09-01)...
OK a leader in allowing responsible free speech on campus | Opinion
Imagine, for a moment, that you are the leader of an Israeli institution of higher education. For the last two years, Israel has fought a multi-front war against enemies on all sides. Now, you learn that someone in the institution’s community has invited a virulently antisemitic opponent of Israeli wartime policy to speak on your campus. What would you do?
Errors in capital cases are costly. Oklahoma needs independent oversight | Opinion
In its last term, the United States Supreme Court reviewed two death penalty cases: Richard Glossip and Brenda Andrew. Both were from Oklahoma County. Both were tried in 2004 and both involved prosecutorial misconduct and error. The current court rarely intervenes in capital cases, making the reversal of Glossip and remand of Andrew especially significant. Errors in capital cases are costly. They harm the victims, the wrongly convicted and the system of justice itself.
Kirk's death is a reminder that freedom of speech must be central at OK colleges | Opinion
“Institutions of higher education struggle with the difficult task of safeguarding free speech while also meeting their obligation to protect members of their campus communities from various harms. Recent events have heightened concerns about balancing freedom of expression and campus safety.” These are the opening words of a paper I wrote several months ago for an international conference on campus free speech.
Only time will tell if Trump's efforts for peace in Ukraine will pay off | Opinion
What a difference a half year makes. Just six months ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was unceremoniously dismissed from his Oval Office meeting with President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance. The relationship between Ukraine and the United States appeared to be in tatters. Hopes for peace in Europe seemed far off. Yet now, just six months later, America and Ukraine seem to be singing from the same songbook.
Qatari airplane kerfuffle contemporary American culture and politics | Opinion
“Qatar Plane Scam.” “Emoluments Clause Violation.” “It’s a Bribe.” These and other similar claims are the headlines of the week. They all involve the Trump administration’s apparent willingness to accept the gift of a Qatari royal family plane to serve as Air Force One. The headlines are loud, attention-getting and harsh. But are they correct? As with so many things in today’s political world, it seems as though everyone has an immediate opinion. And the opinion is absolute.
Trump risks the same trap with Putin as Britain did with Hitler | Opinion
We live in treacherous times and need wise, perceptive leadership in our foreign policy. China, North Korea, Iran and others itch to exploit any hint of weakness. Andy Lester and Marianna Pitts Guest columnists A conflict rages between two neighboring countries. The much larger dictatorship demands significant concessions, including land, from the fledgling democracy next door. Eying the situation from afar, the conservative leader of the world’s greatest power looks to avoid a wider conflict.
We need to balance freedom of expression with civility in public discourse | Opinion Original
College community members “may not obstruct or otherwise interfere with the freedom of others to express views they reject or even loathe.” Andy Lester and Marianna Pitts Guest columnists The Oklahoma Free Speech Committee held its first meeting over two years ago. As an advisory committee to the Oklahoma State Regents for Higher Education, state law empowers it to do three primary things. It reviews institutional policies and procedures that affect free speech.
Oklahoma's capital punishment system is broken; reforms needed before new executions | Guest
Andy Lester September 12, 2024 at 8:00 AM·3 min read This is a guard tower overlooking the maximum-security building at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. The capital punishment system in Oklahoma is broken. It does not work as it should. From start to finish, it is so badly broken that we cannot know whether someone who has been condemned to death is actually deserving of the ultimate penalty. Several years ago, I co-chaired — along with former Gov.
Lester: Free speech on Oklahoma’s college campuses
Andy Lester The past decade has witnessed a near daily flood of headlines detailing instance after instance of the denial of free speech on college campuses. Several prominent institutions of higher education have handled – or rather mishandled – challenges to freedom of expression. In discussing this trend at the February meeting of the Oklahoma Free Speech Committee, little did we know that a serious incident would almost simultaneously occur at yet another major university.
Silo
The science fiction series Silo on Apple TV+ is an adaptation of Hugh Howey's series of Wool books. While the enemy in the series is a shadowy government that hides secrets, Season 1, Episode 3 of the series featured something frightening to many software development and IT professionals: An emergency hardware upgrade with minimal forethought, lack of contingency plans, arbitrary deadlines imposed by upper management, and inadequate communication to users.
Opinion: Oklahoman view on Russo-American relations just what people need to understand today's conflict
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Opening with those words, first penned by William Faulkner, "Containing History: How Cold War History Explains US-Russia Relations" sets out to prove that Cold War history did not end on Christmas Day, 1991, when the Soviet Union imploded, but merely took a brief pause. Stephen P.
Guests: Oklahoma's political leaders need to adopt a moratorium on executions
Is the time ripe for a moratorium on executions in Oklahoma? We think so and urge Oklahoma political leaders to implement one immediately. Just last year, Oklahoma scheduled 25 executions to occur within 29 months. Several executions have since occurred. Yet, serious doubts about the state’s capital punishment system continually confront Oklahoma. The news surrounding the potential execution of Richard Glossip illustrates the point.
Guest column: The new Congress must stay the course and continue to support Ukraine
Now that the 118th Congress has finally convened, and Kevin McCarthy is the Speaker of the House, one question requires an answer. What did McCarthy give away to secure his position? We already know he conceded certain structural changes, such as restoring the right of a single representative to call for the removal of the Speaker or Freedom Caucus seats on the House Rules Committee. Did he make policy concessions, too? Let us hope that at least one important American commitment remains intact.
Text Processing in Linux: Understanding Grep, sed, and AWK
Create a Linode account to try this guide with a $ credit. This credit will be applied to any valid services used during your first days. Grep, sed, and AWK are all standard Linux tools that are able to process text. Each of these tools can read text files line-by-line and use regular expressions to perform operations on specific parts of the file. However, each tool differs in complexity and what can be accomplished. Grep is used for finding text patterns in a file and is the simplest of the three.
Skip the exit interview when you leave your job
When it’s time to leave your job, someone from Human Resources may want to sit you down and have an “exit interview”. They’ll ask you questions like “Why are you leaving your position?” and “What was it like to work with your manager.” It’s done with this premise that they’re looking to make the company better. Don’t take the bait. Say nothing negative about anyone or anything.
Feature comparison of ack, ag, git-grep, grep and ripgrep
There are many greplike tools available to choose from. ripgrep is currently the fastest, which folks seem to focus on, but they have different features. Here's a chart to help you see which tools can do what. If you find this chart useful, consider making one for the projects you run, even if it includes "competing" projects. The best project for someone might not be your project, and that's OK. If you have updates to the chart, please submit as a GitHub issue.
What is carbon offsetting and why is it only part of the answer?
(Photo: Unsplash/Ross Parmly) When we fly, drive or take a cruise we are all contributing to carbon emissions. As we all know the emissions from transport account for a significant percentage of what we pump out into the atmosphere. In the European Union, for example, about 27% of all emissions come from our travel. As a result many organisations offer you the chance to "offset" the carbon you produce for the journeys you make.
Iterative Software Development Best Practices for Software Teams
“Fail fast.” Software engineers and product development execs are constantly told that failing fast—shorthand for taking a highly iterative approach to software development and learning quickly from your mistakes—is the key to success in today’s complex and dynamic technology environments. It’s a valid premise—as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go nearly far enough. A software team isn’t an iteration engine. You can’t simply floor the accelerator and expect a successful outcome.
7 coding tasks you should probably not write yourself
As programmers, we like to solve problems. We like to get ideas to spring from our heads, channel through our fingertips, and create magical solutions. But sometimes we are too quick to jump in and start cranking out code to solve the problem without considering all the implications of the issues we’re trying to solve. We don’t consider that someone else might have already solved this problem, with code available for our use that has already been written, tested, and debugged.
How to Monitor a Code Development Pipeline
At New Relic, we encourage our customers to extend our platform and to make New Relic truly their own. That’s exactly what one engineering team at GEP did after attending a presentation on Best Practices for Measuring your Code Pipeline, by New Relic Senior Solution Consultant Eric Mittelhammer, at a recent FutureStack event. The team from GEP returned home to their New Jersey office, eager to put New Relic to use in monitoring their code development lifecycle.
13 Things People Hate about Your Open Source Docs
13 Things People Hate about Your Open Source Docs Most open source developers like to think about the quality of the software they build, but the quality of the documentation is often forgotten. Nobody talks about how great a project’s docs are, and yet documentation has a direct impact on your project’s success. Without good documentation, people either do not use your project, or they do not enjoy using it.
If you value higher education, stand firm for free speech
VIDEO A specter is haunting American academia — a specter that is stifling academic freedom. Virtually every day, some campus around the country confronts a new challenge to freedom of thought. Unfortunately, many on college campuses appear to be turning their backs on free speech, freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Institutions of higher education face a serious, immediate, and, I believe, existential threat.
How to Start Contributing to Open Source Projects
This post was originally published on May 5th, 2014. It was updated on October 10, 2018. The practice of building and maintaining open source software works because people from all over the world, of all abilities and backgrounds, form communities to support the projects they care about. It’s not difficult to support the open source projects you use every day, and the efforts you make will have tangible effects on the quality of that software.
Becoming a senior developer: 9 experiences you'll encounter
Plenty of career guides suggest appropriate steps to take if you want a management track. But what if you want to stay technical—and simply become the best possible programmer? These non-obvious markers let you know you’re on the right path. Many programming career guidelines stress the skills a software developer is expected to acquire.
The perils of discriminating against applicants based on age
There's still so much talk in the media about discrimination. And not just based on gender or race, but also based on age... In fact, I have recently come across a couple of articles in which people over the age of 45 were classified as "mature aged" and were considered to be at risk of discrimination.
Attorney: Scott Pruitt did the right thing with audit
Recent media coverage of a years-old, closed investigation into alleged wrongdoing involving the Lead Impacted Communities Relocation Assistance Trust (LICRAT) at the Tar Creek Superfund site has mischaracterized the facts and displayed a basic lack of knowledge about American law. This misinformation campaign is being driven by a marriage of convenience between a leftist Washington, D.C., advocacy group and Oklahoma's state auditor, whose campaign for governor is on life support.
Point of View: Leading the way on Oklahoma death penalty reforms
When we agreed to co-chair the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, we viewed it as an opportunity to better understand a difficult issue. The bipartisan commission included five women and six men representing diverse legal, educational and government experience. Together, we spent more than a year analyzing, debating and hearing from major stakeholders, such as law enforcement, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, families of murder victims and those wrongfully convicted.
Designers and Developers: Why Can’t We Get Along?
In which a Web developer and graphic designer do their best to achieve world peace. As long as there have been visual programs, programmers and designers have butted heads. The differences between the two sides of program development seem to often be at odds, even though we all know both team members are important to creating effective applications. Designers fume at seeing their designs implemented different from how they were originally laid out.
New Relic: 7 coding tasks you should probably not write yourself
As programmers, we like to solve problems. We like to get ideas to spring from our heads, channel through our fingertips, and create magical solutions. But sometimes we are too quick to jump in and start cranking out code to solve the problem without considering all the implications of the issues we’re trying to solve. We don’t consider that someone else might have already solved this problem, with code available for our use that has already been written, tested, and debugged.
Bad Tech Job Interview Questions (and How To Answer Them)
Job interviews can be rough under the best of circumstances. They’re not helped any when bad interviewers ask questions that take away from the real point of the interview, which is to assess your skills and how well you fit with the rest of the team. The categories that follow are some of the most commonly asked bad interview questions, which might help to prepare you, so you’re not caught off guard. Keep in mind: Your job in the interview is to sell yourself to the interviewer.
From Payback to Prevention: 5 Ways to Tame Technical Debt in Your Codebase
Whether you’re talking money or code, “debt” tends to be a dirty word. That’s for good reason—just as unchecked spending can lead to all manner of financial woes, poor software development practices can produce a bloated codebase that seems held together by band-aids. But what do we really mean when we talk about technical debt?
13 Things People Hate about Your Open Source Docs
Most open source developers like to think about the quality of the software they build, but the quality of the documentation is often forgotten. Nobody talks about how great a project’s docs are, and yet documentation has a direct impact on your project’s success.
Your PHP Database Code May Be Vulnerable To Hackers
One reason PHP is everywhere is because the language makes it so darn easy to get a simple app up and running. Dozens of online tutorials demonstrate the basics of how to write a database app that you can quickly adapt to your specific needs. But be careful! This strength can also be PHP’s great weakness. Because PHP makes it so easy to create working programs, it’s equally easy for inexperienced programmers to write code that is slow, hard to maintain, and riddled with security holes.
9 Key Trends and Quotes From OSCON 2105
This week’s Open Source Convention (OSCON) in Portland, Ore., is an immersive exploration and celebration of the ever-expanding world of open source software. As usual, New Relic played a key role, including multiple speakers, a bustling booth, sponsored breaks, a book signing, and much more (as well as co-sponsoring the co-located Cultivate conference addressing leadership and culture issues for a new era).
Should a git commit message mention the file that was modified?
I think the real question here is how limited in scope are your commits? If you wait to commit a variety of unrelated changes together in one commit, then you might feel the need to specify what files were changed for what purpose. However, if you simply made more narrow commits more frequently, then a single commit would explain which files were modified and you could simply describe what the purpose was in the message. More commits, more often.
Designers and Developers: Why Can’t We Get Along?
In which a Web developer and graphic designer do their best to achieve world peace. As long as there have been visual programs, programmers and designers have butted heads. The differences between the two sides of program development seem to often be at odds, even though we all know both team members are important to creating effective applications. Designers fume at seeing their designs implemented different from how they were originally laid out.
14 Ways to Contribute to Open Source without Being a Programming Genius or a Rock Star
Plenty of people want to get involved in open source, but don’t know where to start. Here are several ways to help out even if you lack confidence in your technical chops. Open source software has changed computing and the world, and many of you would love to contribute. Unfortunately, many people are daunted by what they imagine is a high barrier to entry into a project.
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