Rake Routes

A simple language spec isn’t a feature when you’re building applications Oct 11, 2020 programming Go famously gushes about its simple and readable language specification. One one hand kudos to Go for having a written specification and kudos for

The Fastest Possible Tests Oct 3, 2020 programming I love tests as a fast programming feedback loop! In the last twenty or so years I’ve seen them go from an occasional critical verification to a

Shrink your data into bitfields (and out again) Apr 29, 2020 programming Some applications want to save every byte. Every last byte! Maybe they have memory constraints, maybe they’re sending data over the network, maybe

Every “if” statement is an object waiting to be extracted Feb 19, 2020 programming Consider the following Ruby code. So we’re modeling beverages. Great! Our class can accept a kind of beverage and then respond to some messages

Choose Generic Tools Jan 3, 2020 programming Upstream your tooling instead of rolling your own. The more you push upstream to gems or Rails, the less logic you need in your application. Save

Hyperlinks you might find interesting — #4 Dec 2, 2019 links How to annotate literally everything Calculus Explained with pics and gifs Paw — API tool for Mac (50% OFF Black Friday Sale) Diagram.Codes xkcd:

Running bundle install on rails master Dec 1, 2019 rails

“Ok! Let’s check out this Rails 6 goodness”, I thought. Clone rails/rails — easy Look around the latest commits — a great way to see what’s been

Use tldr for command line examples Nov 20, 2019 command line If you use the command line you’ve probably already seen manual pages, accessed via the command. pages are great when you need a full reference

Friday Lunch Links — #3 Nov 15, 2019 links Speaking of Diversity: find engineering teams that share your values with Key Values. It’s a nice tool that allows you to select values you’re

Friday Lunch Links — #2 Nov 10, 2019 links Dark Matter: A Primer (PDF) — An excellent academic paper detailing the numerous pieces of evidence we’ve accumulated on the actual, measurable

Logical Solver: Turn facts into conclusions Nov 8, 2019 analysis

I’ve been playing through Dishonored 2 and last night I came across the Jindosh Lock Puzzle. It’s straight forward enough. There are five family

Programming with jq Nov 7, 2019 command line & programming

So jq is awesome. When you need to process JSON then jq is your factory line transforming the raw JSON ingredients into delicious ice cream

Command line tools - jq Nov 6, 2019 command line Need to parse some JSON data? Of course you do! JSON is practically the lifeblood of API calls these days. GitHub Google Cloud Storage Lots of

Friday Lunch Links — #1 Nov 1, 2019 links Hello! Here’s a collection of interesting links I’ve found in the last week. Enjoy! The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice by Gerard E. Dallal,

Why diversity matters Oct 30, 2019 career

Lack of diversity in tech is no accident. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, returned to his alma mater Stanford in 2012 to teach his now famous

Music for coding - October 2019 Oct 29, 2019 music Like working to music? I do! Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately. Pinout (Original Soundtrack) [feat. Susanna Lundgren] by Douglas Holmquist

Code puzzles are a poor way to gauge technical candidates Oct 24, 2019 career The tech industry is a long way from having a common good interview process. There are many problems, but today I’m going to write about one in

Add vim to a pipeline with vipe Jan 18, 2019 command line Have you ever wanted to stop and edit text in the middle of a pipeline? With you can! Take the output of as an example. What we if want to call

Connecting Objects with Observable Dec 5, 2018 ruby Today let’s dive a bit into the Observable module from Ruby’s standard library. Let’s say we’re launching a rocket. Fortunately we have a very high

Let’s write a shell script Sep 6, 2016 command line Now that you have a $PATH let’s start using it! Today we’ll write a simple shell script in your personal directory. Let’s start by picking the

Rake Routes

by Stephen Ball