Category: Code

• February 8, 2017

  Copypasta, you’re the worst pasta

  Copypasta. It’s the worst. “I need something like this code here, I’ll just drop it over there where I need it. Maybe change a few things.” Only you can prevent headdesks! It’s not really possible, in my experience, to make it easier to use code through methods and functions than to just copy what you […]
• February 7, 2017

  Through mocks and back

  A problem with double/stub/mock libraries is that they don’t often fail in a total manner. They don’t snap like a pencil when they’re used improperly. Instead, when you use them unwisely, they lay in waiting. At an inopportune time, they leap out. Change an internal API method name or argument list and your poorly conceived […]
• February 1, 2017

  Does an unadvertised extension point even exist?

  There was an extension point, but I missed it. I was adding functionality to a class. I needed to add something that seemed a little different, but not too far afield, from what the existing code was doing. So I came up with a good name, wrote a method, and went about my day. A […]
• January 22, 2017

  The TTY demystified. Learn you an arcane computing history, terminals, shells, UNIX, and even more arcanery! Terminal emulators are about the most reliable, versatile tools in my not-so-modern computing toolkit. It’s nice to know a little more about how they work, besides “lots of magic ending in -TY”, e.g. teletypes, pseudo-terminals, session groups, etc.
• January 8, 2017

  Clinton Dreisbach: A favorite development tool: direnv. I’ve previously used direnv to manage per-project environment variables. It’s easy to set up and use for this. I highly recommend it! But, I’d never thought of using it to define per-project shell aliases as Clinton does. Smart!
• January 2, 2017

  Turns out Ruby is great for scripting!

  Earlier last year, I gave myself two challenges: write automation scripts in Ruby (instead of giving up on writing them in shell) use system debugging tools (strace, lsof, gdb, etc.) more often to figure out why programs are behaving some way Of course, I was almost immediately stymied on the second one: dtruss is the […]
• January 1, 2017

  Tinkers are a quantity game, not a quality game

  I spend too much time fretting about what to build my side projects and tinkers with. On the one hand, that’s because side projects and tinkers are precisely for playing with things I normally wouldn’t get a chance to use. On the other hand, it’s often dumb because the tinker isn’t about learning a new […]
• October 25, 2016

  The least bad solution

  Sometimes I look over the options and constraints to choose something suboptimal. I have to pick the least-bad solution. I recently chose a least-bad way to write a test. In a Rails app, the most sensible thing to solve my problem was something like this: In the test, I ended up having to write this […]
• October 20, 2016

  Wanted: state machines in the language

  Our programming languages are often structured around the problem domain of compilers and the archaic (for most of us) task of converting things people understand to a thing the computer can execute. Why don’t our languages have deeper support for the ways we reason about problem domains or the ways we struggle to reason. For […]
• September 26, 2016

  We’re all adults here, but we’re not all mind readers

  My favorite advice on the topic of method visibility (i.e. public vs. private) comes from Python creator Guido van Rossum. It goes something like “we’re all adults here” and says it’s not really a necessary thing for compilers/runtimes to hide methods from specific callers. Don’t go mucking around in other object’s implementations. I still think […]