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I’ve spent a lot of my tech career pursuing the One True Language, or One True Library, or some means of doing something in a unified way that could serve as an answer to the problems I was having. The polyglot folks would probably just say some langauges are better than others at certain things and so we should use several languages at once when building applications. I’m not sure I agree with this. I believe most of our languages are pretty good at the problem domains we select them for, or at least they could be. ...

There’s a lot of stuff to know in tech. While it’s possible to know conceptually how things work from top to bottom, knowing all of the specifics is another story. I’ve run into a lot of engineers who just don’t understand what it’s about at all, so my hope is to clear that up. REST is a very common tool in the web world, and for good reason. If you want to know all of the super specific stuff about REST and look up RFCs, wikipedia’s REST article is probably a good start. This is not that article. The purpose here is to give you a really basic idea of what this whole REST thing is. RESTful APIs are pretty sweet compared to existing alternatives, but more details can be covered in a later post. ...

I’ve known and used Markdown here and there for some time, but I’m starting to really see its value. On the surface, Markdown is a way to take text and make decent looking HTML out of it, and the text still looks like some typical formatting in a plain text environment. I’ve sent managers these kinds of files, and they can just open these files in any text editor if they don’t have means of viewing Markdown. ...

Demystifying Webpack Table of Contents Demystifying Webpack Some Background Enter Webpack Loaders Plugins Conclusion Some Background I’ve played with a lot of the Javascript build tools in the ecosystem. Today, Webpack is my go to. I like it because it adds static analysis to my file paths for virtually everything. It also has fairly clear ways in which it transforms files. As with any tool, there’s trade-offs to it. I can’t get map files working for my unit tests, and the initial builds can take a really long time (upwards of a minute). Sure I can turn some features off to speed it up, but then I’ll miss certain errors. For example, Angular’s dependency injection system can lean on just the function parameter names, which break when any kind of minification is done. If I’m not minifying, I’m potentially missing those errors. ...

Table of Contents Functional Programming with Angular Angular and Functional programming Checklist to get functional Get on a package manager Export all the things Demolish privacy Pass more parameters Pass functions, not objects Mutate state at the last possible second Added benefit: Unit testing Conclusion Functional Programming with Angular Angular.js has paid my bills for about 4 years now. It’s a behemoth framework commonly adopted by larger organizations wishing to get into the rich web client space. The larger organizations come from “tried and true” Java or C# frameworks like Spring, Struts, Dropwizard, MVC.net, and others I’m sure I’ve missed. If so, a lot of the trimmings that Angular has are very comfortable to you. There’s a routing mechanism, there’s an MVC-like structure, templates, and you have means of making things “private” in this icky JavaScript that looks so goofy and unsafe. ...

Procedural generation has been something of keen interest to me for a while now. This kind of work is tied up in all kinds of algorithmic computer-science-y stuff that’s a source of endless fascinating. One of the big things I like about it is it puts the hard work of content generation towards the computer. Computers aren’t very clever, but they have immense computational brute strength. We can leverage this to create content derived from abstract reasoning rather than heaps of raw data. ...

Table of Contents introduction reading material and citations plot ob-gnuplot reset separator dates working example introduction org-mode supports graphing with gnuplot. This can be done directly with #+plot but it’s very rudimentary. It can also be done with org-babel and I can still feed tables into it. reading material and citations ob-gnuplot docs Has lots of good examples for gnuplot via ob-gnuplot. org-plot docs org-plot documentation. Examples feel sparse for my simian mind. org-plot tutorial And has the org mode version I can use as reference. Plotting (with gnuplot) using dates timestamps Mailing list discussion showing how org-timestamp columns get converted to another format. gnuplot documentation ...