The other day my daughter asked me about Software Engineering -- what do we actually do? She's eighteen and probably won't follow in my footsteps, which is fine, but I still want her to see my field.

I've always found this question hard to answer. I've been an engineering manager for a long time, and I'm happy to describe that job (emails, 1:1's, PRD reviews), but I don't think that's the heart of it. Plus these days I work for Google where things there are proprietary and deeply layered, not much help for answering questions like these.

Recently I've found my way to Mastodon for obvious reasons. I chose the Hachyderm instance because it was well run by people who shared my values. It turns out that the values of the owners and operators of the things we use matter, huh.

I then learned a cool thing, that the Hachyderm admins do much of their work publicly. They livestream debugging sessions on Twitch, they write postmortems, they share live graphs. @nova happened to be live-streaming at that moment, not surprising since the team's been busy absorbing thousands of new users and fending off attacks. My daughter and I watched a bit together.

Team Hachyderm (@nova @dma @quintessence @Taniwha @hazelweakly @malte): thank you for running this service well. But also thank you for giving me something I'm proud to use and proud to show my kid.

How many different New York Times Spelling Bee puzzles are there? Or more precisely, how many combinations of seven letters can be used to build Bee-type puzzles?

It turns out 7,742 different seven letter combinations can be used to generate Bee-style puzzles. There are more puzzles themseves based on what letter is chosen for the middle spot.

The majority of letter choices, about 62%, have just one pangram. That's lower than I expected, actually. It's not that uncommon to have two or three pangrams, which happens about about 25% of the time, and nearly four out of ten puzzles will have more than one pangram. The full output is here, the output of this program.

Watch out for the combination einprst. If this one ever comes up, good luck finding all twenty-seven of its pangrams.

The Bee Puzzle

A Bee puzzle has seven letters with one "special" letter in the middle. Make as many words as You can find with at least four letters, using only the letters given, but it has to use the center letter. Proper nouns aren't allowed. Every puzzle has at least one pangram, a word that uses all letters — this example's is amphibian. Wikipedia cites Frank Longo as the Bee's creator.

nytbee.com has more today's puzzle and some interesting stats about these puzzles in general. They don't seem to be affiliated with the NY Times but that seem to be OK and is's a nice site.