Ryan Warsaw ryanwarsaw

Common App & Stanford Essays

The following are my responses to the main Common App essay and the Stanford application questions. You're welcome to read them to try and understand how I got "in" to Stanford, or just for fun. Whatever you choose to try and take away from these essays, I hope you get something out of them. Or nothing at all, that works too. Enjoy.

A Brief Note

There's no secret formula. There are a lot of people more qualified than me that got denied. Even though they may have been more qualified, I beat them when it came to the essays. The most important part of your application is your essays, so I would encourage you to spend a lot of time on them. Spend time reflecting on who you are and how you can use your essays to communicate that. The readers of the over 40,000 Stanford applicants know a fake essay from a mile away. If you want to have a chance at admission, your essays need to be 100% authentic you, not 90% authentic you and 10% your mom/tutor/fake self.

If you plan to apply, I

System Design Cheatsheet

Picking the right architecture = Picking the right battles + Managing trade-offs

Basic Steps

Clarify and agree on the scope of the system

User cases (description of sequences of events that, taken together, lead to a system doing something useful)
- Who is going to use it?
- How are they going to use it?

How to Install / Bootcamp Windows 10 on a mid-2011 iMac using USB

Apple has released support for bootcamping Windows 10, but only on 2012 Macs and later. Despite not being supported. it is possible to install Windows 10 on earlier iMacs and it seems to run quite well.

IMPORTANT: Unplug all external and physical hard drives (where possible) that you won't be installing to to avoid accidentally erasing them. Also make note of which drives and partitions remain (e.g. System and Storage hard drives), and be super careful to not erase the wrong one.

RECOVERY: If you nuke your machine, restore your time machine backup. Instructions here.

Requirements

Methods of Signing Git Commits on MacOS

Last updated March 13, 2024

This Gist explains how to sign commits using gpg in a step-by-step fashion. Previously, krypt.co was heavily mentioned, but I've only recently learned they were acquired by Akamai and no longer update their previous free products. Those mentions have been removed.

Additionally, 1Password now supports signing Git commits with SSH keys and makes it pretty easy-plus you can easily configure Git Tower to use it for both signing and ssh.

For using a GUI-based GIT tool such as Tower or Github Desktop, follow the steps here for signing your commits with GPG.

	require 'net/http'
	require 'json'
	require 'uri'

	@token = ''

	def list_files
	ts_to = (Time.now - 30 * 24 * 60 * 60).to_i # 30 days ago
	params = {
	token: @token,

	# In order for gpg to find gpg-agent, gpg-agent must be running, and there must be an env
	# variable pointing GPG to the gpg-agent socket. This little script, which must be sourced
	# in your shell's init script (ie, .bash_profile, .zshrc, whatever), will either start
	# gpg-agent or set up the GPG_AGENT_INFO variable if it's already running.

	# Add the following to your shell init to set up gpg-agent automatically for every shell
	if [ -f ~/.gnupg/.gpg-agent-info ] && [ -n "$(pgrep gpg-agent)" ]; then
	source ~/.gnupg/.gpg-agent-info
	export GPG_AGENT_INFO
	else

	#![allow(unused_variables)]
	#![allow(unused_imports)]

	use std::env;
	use std::process;
	use std::thread;
	use std::io::{self, Read, Write, Error};
	use std::net::TcpStream;
	use std::net::TcpListener;

	#! /usr/bin/env ruby

	# NOTE: Requires Ruby 2.1 or greater.

	# This script can be used to parse and dump the information from
	# the 'html/contact_info.htm' file in a Facebook user data ZIP download.
	#
	# It prints all cell phone call + SMS message + MMS records, plus a summary of each.
	#
	# It also dumps all of the records into CSV files inside a 'CSV' folder, that is created

	{
	"version": 0,
	"weeks": [
	{
	"id": "0",
	"title": "Week 1",
	"topic": "Which fruits are best on a rainy day?",
	"video": "videos/week1.mp4",
	"quiz": {
	"questions": [

	{
	"quiz-log": [
	{
	"week-id": "0",
	"completed-date": "05-24-18",
	"attempts": [
	[0, "i don't understand this quiz"],
	[2, "i feel great"]
	]
	},