I still remember the heated arguments I’d have with my high school professors about dynamic languages. What do you mean python isn’t a real language? What’s wrong with you!? Dynamic languages are the coolest thing ever! Some kids fight about curfews and school rules, I fought about scripting languages being just as “real” as the… Read more »
Posts Categorized: A tech a day
Mouse movements in a day of coding
A few weeks ago I bought a fancy new mouse to replace my fancy old mouse. Sure it’s nice and comfy, but how much do I actually use it? When you pay close to a hundred euro for something you want to make sure it’s doing its job. Yesterday I tried. For the whole day,… Read more »
Writing a REST client in Haskell
A few days ago I decided to buy some bitcoin. Then I noticed it fluctuates a lot despite a general upwards trend. Hmmm … if I just bought at the right moment and sold at a different right moment, I could make money fall out of the void! I have since lost $5 by playing… Read more »
Bring Ruby VCR to Javascript testing with Capybara and puffing-billy
Let’s say you are writing an application in Ruby. You are probably talking to every API under the sun and are happily writing tests to make sure your code isn’t failing. Because you don’t want to rely on 3rd parties or an internet connection to make your tests pass or fail you mock everything with… Read more »
Sexy animated spirographs in 35 sloc of d3.js
You probably remember spirographs as kid’s toys from your youth. I had a simple set that was just a collection of plastic sprockets with holes for pencils. Endless amounts of fun when I was two or three years old. I think … I don’t really remember much from that time, but I remember having those… Read more »
#ifihadglass – the app I want to build
For about a year now Google has been teasing us with its wearable computing idea – Glass. And for just as long, people have been making fun of the concept. Calling it anything from utterly ridiculous, to a despicable invasion into everybody’s privacy. The running joke on the internet is that you should walk up… Read more »
First impressions of Rails as a Javascripter
When Rails first came out, I was still a PHP guy. Slaving away at a web agency, pushing out website after website and letting designers have all the fun. At the time I didn’t even notice Rails existed. When news of Ruby and Rails finally did reach me, I was fully immersed in Python and… Read more »
The trials and tribulations of a large-ish dataset
Last week I wrote a little script in node.js. Its goal? GET ALL THE DATA! The plan was to scrape a massive dataset off Github and do some analysis of programmers’ working habits, at least the ones using Github that is. As such, the script was fairly simple – run a search query via the… Read more »
My very own daily WTF
People often hire me to grab their codebase by the horns and introduce a modicum of engineering standards. Eventually I get to implement new features, but they usually come at the cost of heavy refactoring before I can even get started. A good month ago a founder emails me “Hey, I have this product, customer development at… Read more »
Elegantly using socket.io in backbone apps
Backbone.js is my favourite modern MVC framework for client-side javascript. Not that I’ve seriously tried any others … simply didn’t feel the need to. The way apps are usually organised is Backbone is that data is king. A view reacts to some user action and changes some data in a model. Everybody who’s listening for… Read more »