What I'm Drinking: JJBean

I’ve chosen JJBean as the supplier of my morning coffee beans for a couple years now. Whether out of a moka pot, aeropress, or french press, beans from JJBean never cease to keep my taste buds occupied while the rest of me attempts to kickstart my day. If purchased at one of the local cafes around Vancouver the beans will have been freshly roasted, usually in the past couple days. If there was ever doubt the roasting date is conveniently printed on the bottom of every bag. Furthermore, the single origin beans offer a nice range of flavors and a simple rotation is enough to stave off boredom.

My Daily Coffee Obsession: The Routine

My coffee obsession has taken a sharp turn toward addiction. And I’m OK with that I think. It’s my morning routine and it goes something like this:

1. Grind beans from local roaster with Haribo burr grinder.
2. Three heaping tablespoons of coffee into espro press.
3. Water in kettle to 200C.
4. Slowly fill espro press until just covering the beans. Allow grinds to bloom (about 30 seconds).
5. Fill up the rest of espro press.
6. Have Alexa set an alarm for 4 minutes.
7. Plunge filter and pour.

The process takes about 10 minutes in total. If I continue this routine for the rest of my life, that’s about 116 days out of the next 16,700 that I’ll happily spend making my daily bean juice.

Vancouver Weather Analysis: Umbrella Days per Year

From fall to spring Vancouver receives upwards of 1000 mm of precipitation on average and is a legitimately gloomy place to live from October to March. Mercifully, since the bulk of our rain falls between fall and spring, our summers (usually) cannot be beat with often little rain and relatively temperate weather.

All of this rain translates to about 185 days per year with precipitation. In other words we carry an umbrella for half the year. Especially in November. November sucks.

Vancouver Weather Analysis: Beach Days per Year

How many days per year can you comfortably lounge at the beach in Vancouver, BC? We from the Pacific Northwest tend to be optimistic with weather and shed our clothing at the first hint of warmth, while those in equatorial climates have less need for such blind optimism.

This analysis defines a “beach day” as any day without recorded rain and with temperatures above certain given thresholds. To accommodate a range of temperature tolerances the number of beach days is calculated for temperatures between 22C and 30C in 2C increments. Data is for years 2000 to 2016. Box plots show the average number of rainless days above the given thresholds. The reader is left to decide their place in the tolerance range.

Vancouver Weather Analysis: BBQ Days per Year

It rains a lot in Vancouver. And while your beach-going days will be numbered and cherished there are a surprising number of barbeque days thanks to temperate climate. In fact, since 2000 there have been an average of 112 days per year you can comfortably grill a dead animal outside.

This analysis calculates a barbeque day as a day at or above 15C without rain. These light jacket days define the Northwest, Vancouver in particular. The number of days in this temperate range are also consistent from year to year with 2015 being the only exceptional year.

Silly British (Columbian) Design: B.C. Speculation and Vacancy Tax

I’ve yet to start a Canadian equivalent to my “Silly British Designs” blog series. But there is no time like the present, especially since British Columbia just sent out the B.C. speculation and vacancy tax declaration…to everyone. No I’m serious, to every single property owner in the taxable region - 1.6 million people. This opt-out pattern is so absurdly ill-conceived that the declaration itself couldn’t hide the stupidity. I’ll just go ahead and quote two sentences that are nearly adjacent in the declaration form.

Authentic Roman Pizza

Since our last trip to Italy, I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time and energy contemplating the virtues and characteristics of Roman style pizza. In fact, my search has been borderline obsessive in that every place we’ve lived since, including Oxford, New York, Seattle and now Vancouver, I’ve searched out pizza places that share those same characteristics, for both nostalgia’s sake and to continue my analysis. My conclusion about Roman style pizza, I think, is admittedly dull: it is an art. And like all art, there isn’t a single style. Classifying a pizza as “Roman style” simply isn’t possible.

Using Typescript with AWS Lambda

My 2018 side projects have nearly all included the use of AWS Lambda. From Alexa skills to APIs to notification services, I’ve become adept at building and deploying Lambda-based services this year. As a front-end developer in my day job, I’m most comfortable coding in Javascript. But Javascript feels like the wrong tool for a middle tier or back-end service. The lack of types make these services unnecessarily difficult to read and reason about. Instead of switching to a reasonable language (read golang) I decided to write all my Lambda services in Typescript, and I haven’t once looked back.

Turns out my kids listen, just not to me

I learned last week that my four-year old can listen and follow instruction. This is reassuring as a parent since she starts kindergarten this coming school year and we’ve already had a bit of a disaster experience putting her into ballet. That isn’t to say that my four-year-old is a disobedient child, on the contrary, as four-year-olds go she does an average job of being attentive. But we were pleasantly surprised when we sent her to Whistler Kids adventure ski camp last week and on the last day she came down the mountain in full control of her skis as if she’d had a full winter’s worth of practice. On her end of camp report card she was even given an “excellent” score in listening. After looking back on the week, talking with the instructors, and spying on her from the base of Whistler Kids, I think I’ve stitched a few learnings together.

Tropical Milkshake IPA

There is a trend in the North American beer scene toward low-bitterness, hazy pale ales and IPAs, no doubt propelled forward by the success of the New England IPA. I can’t tell if people here in BC genuinely like these tropical fruit milkshakes masquerading as beer, or whether the style has somehow become a differentiator between craft beer and big beer. As for me, I’d prefer not drinking it. The problem is that it cannot be avoided: it is literally impossible to tell off a menu if the beer will be bright and crisp, or resemble milky orange juice.