Verbose Logging

It’s actually happening. I’m writing a book. I saw a gap in the programming world. Most languages have an extensive standard library and core that a lot of programmers are missing out on. I was doing things the long way because I just didn’t know the standard library had something built in. I’m trying to fill that gap with deep looks at the standard library of your favorite language. My first step is called Go, The Stan...

This is a weird gaming emotion post. If you’re not into video games, or just don’t feel like reading something not about programming, I won’t feel bad if you leave. I just wanted to post this here as it’s my main blogging platform, and it’s about computer stuff so why not. Spoiler Alert I’m going to write as if you know Mass Effect already. There will be spoilers (even if you’ve played it all the way t...

Instead of doing the standard 9-5 salary based job, it’s popular in the software development world to work as a contractor, or freelancer.1 Right now, I do the 9-5 thing. I’m learning it’s because of one major fact. I’d be terrible at it It comes down to the fact that as a contractor, you have no control over the environment. The company paying you doesn’t use git? Too bad. Git, but no GitHub? So sad. Test-unit wh...

Ruby 1.9 has 4 different ways to deal with closures. Cue music Proc Procs are the weird ones of the bunch. Technically, all of these things I’m going to describe are Procs. By that I mean, if you check the class, it’s a Proc. A Proc is made by using Proc.new and passing a block, Proc.new { |x| x }, or by using the proc keyword, proc { |x| x }. A return from inside exits completely out of the method enclosing the Proc. A Proc doesn...

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. You get into some new tech over the weekend. With enough excitement to kill a horse, you whip up a ruby gem and put it on Github. You get a few hits, some people using it over the next little while. A few bugs get reported, and you fix them. A few features get requested, and you implement them. A few pull requests get submitted too, and you merge them. You’re using it yourself, so you’...

But you already knew that, right? These days, in fancy AJAX applications, you frequently want a link on a page to just do asynchronous things. You don’t actually want the link to go anywhere. Let’s just ignore the fact that this goes against progressive enhancement okay? Can I see your ID please? So sometimes the link is important enough, and you throw an id on it and you can do this in jQuery. $('#important-link').click(function()...