iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 09/01/2026

The last few months have been a blur, but over the holiday break I got back into some #datavisualization and finished this project compiling and normalizing data for #structuralengineering licenses in the US using @observablehq.com structural-engineering.fyi #dataviz #aec

structural-engineering.fyi

Structural Engineering.fyi

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 19/11/2025

Oh my god. I used tech speak on a non tech person and told her that I was free all today other than standup at 9 if she wanted to grab dinner... ...which she interpreted as, I had standup comedy at 9 pm, so when I met her at 7 pm, she asked me about my burgeoning stage career. 🫠

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

I think today is a good day to open a #codeberg account.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

Currently experiencing the Baader-Meinhof effect about SIMD and I’m not mad about it.

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Like if I have a loop over a Vec<Vector3d<f64>> summing values, will it automatically utilize SIMD? Is there a way to "turn off" SIMD, or isolate which code blocks it would apply to (or if I need to do that explicitly) so I can get a better understanding of if/where it works? #rust #rustaceans

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According to this: dimforge.com/blog/2020/03... nalgebra automatically has support for SIMD AoSSoA, but looking at the crate, it appears there's just a set of traits that are SIMD. I don't know how to investigate where SIMD would happen automatically (if at all). #rust #rustlang

dimforge.com

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Any #rustaceans here have experience with nalgebra and SIMD? I'm looking to get a better understanding of how SIMD is integrated into nalgebra and if it is automatic. #rustlang #rust

dimforge.com

It’s obviously the cat that is elevating the coolness factor.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 04/08/2025

I am rewriting my geometric constraint library out of Python into Rust, and hooboy this is a lot easier than Cython.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 04/07/2025

Nerdiest thing I have done in a while… When you *really* want a book on Japanese and German joinery but the flat shipping cost is more than half the cost of the book, you find 4 friends to go in on buying a bunch of copies #structuralengineering

A well wrapped copy of The Joinery Compendium

A box full of copies of the book, The Joinery Compendium

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

I saw it on Reddit as a text headline and assumed that it was paraphrasing/exaggerating. Couldn’t believe it when I turned on audio for the clip 🫠🤦‍♀️

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Ballard farmers market delivering on the promise of fresh berries…

8 pints of berries. From left to right: loganberries, red raspberries, tayberries, and French strawberries

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I left with @hillelwayne.com’s Practical TLA+ 😅

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

Surprisingly spotted in a technical bookstore (Ada’s in Capitol Hill): AutoCAD 2021! I couldn’t figure out the sorting system *at all* aside for sections for O’Reilly and No Starch Press.

A bookshelf with volumes on iOS, PHP, networking, and AutoCAD 2021!

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 17/06/2025

Hot take 🔥 Smoke testing is a dumb term for sanity checking or happy path. Just more useless jargon to sound impressive. (Also if your company *only* does smoke testing, run for the hills)

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 30/05/2025

New savory oatmeal hack: Mama Lil’s pickled peppers

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 15/05/2025

En route to #pyconus after a brief stopover in NYC for part of Never Graduate week! I’ll be talking about debugging in #cython (both at runtime and for memory management) on Saturday after lunch. us.pycon.org/2025/schedule/pre… Looking forward to seeing everyone at the conference! #pycon25

us.pycon.org

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 10/05/2025

✅ Laptop closed ✅ Slack uninstalled ✅ Bridge bag stuffed to the gills with goodies, including my steam deck, emacs stickers, pins, and e-ink stuff ✅ At the airport headed to NYC for the first half of Never Graduate Week before flying onwards to #pycon Here's hoping things are on an upward trend

A well appointed messenger bag in a blue print with bridges on it stuffed to the gills with the Database Internals book, a steam deck, laptop, super note, headphones and other electronic accoutrements including e-ink tags

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 26/04/2025

Finally did my first outdoor run post injury (and since moving to Seattle) and nearly got attacked by some Canadian geese (they were just off the running path with their goslings). My mom’s comment was: “Well they’re Canadian and you’re American.” 🫠

Angry pair of Canadian geese with their four goslings just next to a running path by the sound.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I fundamentally don’t understand how grown adults don’t buckle their seatbelts.

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 17/04/2025

Finally got a fully working #python #pandas sidecar in @tauri.app 🎉 ...though I should probably rewrite it in @pola.rs 😬 But for now, here's how I did it! mclare.blog/posts/writin...

mclare.blog

Writing a pandas Sidecar for Tauri | MClare Blog

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 16/04/2025

It's not surprising that the data I collect for some of my side projects has very poor security practices, but finding an unprotected API with a default react username and password in the query string is a new one for me.😬

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

Feels like a lifetime ago, I got spooked by the amount of coding that was going to be expected for the project… … and ironically a decade later I’m a software engineer.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

In a really bizarre full circle moment I just had a student explain a structural system to me that was originally going to be the basis of my PhD thesis (I opted not to pursue the degree and topic).

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 11/04/2025

@pulumi.com makes it easy to deploy static sites and track directory changes if you’re using AWS, Azure, or GCP, but if you’re using Hetzner like me, you’re out of luck. I took a stab at it using git history, but might look into a more robust solution like rsync 🤔 mclare.blog/posts/syncin...

mclare.blog

Syncing Static Sites with Pulumi | MClare Blog

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 10/04/2025

I am so confused why Ryan Reynolds is apparently on the circuit for tech conferences as a keynote speaker (doesn't he have enough money already??) First Autodesk (I must've missed that he's also a developer) and now Postman (does he think the company delivers mail?) What will he even talk about?

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

I tweaked my IT band after a month of dedicated running (of course...) and the cats are taking advantage of my prone state of working on the couch. However, this mean my laptop is *in* my lap, thus occupying the space they normal would. Does this stop them? No. No it does not.

A bewildered person holding a cat that has launched themselves onto their chest where there is no support. The cat looks nonplussed.

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Today's #emacs learning is that I can generate ERDs with #mermaidjs inside #orgmode

An org mode buffer in emacs with a text representation of a database table. There is an inline png in the results from the literate programming block execution

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 06/04/2025

Snuggles (and vigorous ear cleaning) on this #caturday #MurphyNCooper

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Two different projects thankfully!

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

In today’s #rust adventure, I successfully sideloaded a #python subprocess! In today’s #python adventure, I successfully sideloaded a #javascript subprocess! Apparently I’m at the stage of my career where I shove languages into other languages (I swear I have a good reason in both instances!)

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 04/04/2025

Not happy about it but feeling vindicated about getting a new computer last month 😞💀

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Is it a coincidence that World Backup Day is the day before April Fools? 🤔🤨🧐

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Didn't get around to this on Friday, but the last #structuralengineer #dataviz I had planned as a draft for this project was to *finally* do an Upset plot (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UpSet_p...) No frills on this one, but it was fun to figure out how to do this in raw d3 rather than using the library.

An upset plot consisting of a dot matrix combined with bar charts. This allows the user to show relationships similar to a venn diagram, but across many categories. In this case, it shows in descending size, which state or state combinations have the most licensees.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

I also tried to do something fun with dot plots but it was too many dots for the scale (still looked kind of pretty!)

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Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Another quick stacked bar chart, less than 10 lines of code with @observablehq.com #observableplot This one looks at for active #structuralengineer licenses, how "old" is the license holder's oldest license, and how many states are they currently actively licensed in.

a stacked bar chart, number of active licenses determines the color, the bar is the "age" -> year licensed, and height of the bars is the number of people that fall in that bucket.

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Compared to yesterday's visual, this plot shows is that there were a huge number of licenses awarded in those outlier years, but many of them are no longer active or are duplicate licenses. The raw numbers for 2008 and 2021 were 1822 licenses in UT and 1333 in GA.

Zoom in of the previous plot, indicating a tooltip highlighting the number of light green (UT) entries in 2008 as 1822

Maryanne Wachter @mclare.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

Real quick #dataviz today. I took all the raw license data (~32000) entries, and plotted the aggregates by year and state in a stacked bar chart. This is where it's really obvious about the outliers in UT and GA thanks to legislation changes.

A stacked bar chart of the number of awarded SE licenses per year since the 1930s. Two outliers occur in 2008 and 2021 where > 5x the typical number of licenses were awarded.

The 2021 spike is almost entirely due to the state of Georgia passing a similar SE License bill. If you submitted your qualifications before 2021, you were able to obtain a license without taking the exam. (Unfortunately the link for the affadavit is dead, so I can't verify the requirements).

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Nearly 70% of licenses administered in 2008 were awarded in Utah (944 by my count), which is more than any year other than 2021. The legislation linked above allowed any individual who had been practicing as a structural engineer for only 3 years to obtain a license without taking the exam.

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You would think that 2021 is due to COVID-19. The pandemic closed all testing centers, and at the time the exam was only administered twice a year. ...Nope (the plot thickens). The 2008 spike is a direct result of legislation in Utah. le.utah.gov/~2008/bills/...

le.utah.gov

Utah Legislature SB0200

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I also changed the bars to *not* display the cumulative data. Doing this showed significant spikes in first licenses granted in a given year in 2008 and 2021. Guess what those spikes are due to?

Bar and line chart with a binned bar chart for licenses awarded per year. The bars show two spikes in the years 2008 and 2021, where the number of licenses more than doubled.

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The updated visualization includes all active licenses (it's impossible to take inactive licenses and "drop" them at the right time for the cumulative plot), and is based on the deduplicated data and isolating the earliest year of licensure (no double counting new licenses from reciprocity)

Bar and line chart with a similar cumulative bar chart plot. The line and bar charts show similar increasing trends to the first plot

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