TL;DR Click here to see the visualizations with some example data . Background In order to get on the same page about money, my wife and I sit down each month and review where we’re at financially. This dashboard helps discuss questions like: Where did all of our spending go last month? How does last month’s spending compare with previous months? How far along are we in our yearly savings goals?…
Android bug reports contain a massive amount of information about what’s happening on your device. They’re big, relatively poorly documented, and not easy to navigate. This post has my notes on digging into a bug report in a text editor. A lot of the information is generic to bug reports, but the copy/pastable bits are specific to vim. Why plain text? I’ve seen some good web UIs for looking at bug…
i was originally going to present this at [austinjs][], but i ran out of time because we had so many good lightning talks. so i'll post it here instead. UPDATE: parts of this became out-of-date with the introduction of lodash’s lazy evluation . what if underscore (or lodash for that matter) was written in es6 ? features like destructuring assignments and the spread operator would certainly make…
reactive programming demos are impressive. two of my favorites are: the flapjax paper ’s example of drag and drop jafar husain ’s example of an auto-complete widget it’s surprising that such succinct code can accomplish such messy tasks with so few abstractions. but when the elegance combines with unfamiliarity, it’s easy to forget that wisdom we’ve learned through hard years on the front lines of…
i’ve had the opportunity to do some c++ lately, and i’ve been reading up on stl iterators . i couldn’t help but notice similar use cases with input iterators and the generators found in python and now javascript , though the mechanisms are very different. two things stick out to me. complexity c++ iterators are so much more complex than generators. they introduce a hierarchy of categories that…
i’ve been posting each week this summer about my software engineering course that i’m taking at ut. the final writing task is to summarize the experience for someone considering taking the course next semester. the good there’s too much to put here. the course is great. just take it. here are a few highlights: you end up with a nice project you can post online you get experience collaborating with…
the professor of my software engineering course has delivered a lot of lectures on python and sql. he does an excellent job of walking us through the technology and asking us questions along the way that demand our attention and keep us engaged. i find it puzzling though, because he seems to only focus on the details of the technology, and he doesn’t really give us a high-level overview. for…
in my software engineering course we had to make a website of information about world crises. a large portion of the project was exporting the data to xml and sharing it between groups. this was a well-designed project because it encouraged us to learn several common skills in software engineering: exporting and importing data industry standard technologies like xml, sql, and python cooperating…
i read the flapjax paper for my software engineering class at UT. it presents a language and framework for functional reactive programming in javascript that’s suitable for the web. i think it has some really powerful ideas that could make it a better design pattern than mvc (or mv* ) aside from sounding like academic bull , functional reactive programming is a complicated concept. so let’s begin…
the big group project in my software engineering course involves creating: a Django app with Python that emulates IMDB to track world crises our team has been working hard, and i’m happy to say that our django app is coming along nicely: …err wait… 98% javascript? that can’t be right… sometimes github gets these counts wrong: astacy∂ʇoqǝɔɐʇs ☠ ~/code/cs373/wcdb 03:43:57 Jul25 § cloc crisis…
a significant portion of the first big group project in my software engineering course was deciding on a data format and schema. we were required to use xml , and though we weren’t required to agree on a schema, we will have to import eachother’s data later in the course, so we made our future lives much easier by developing and adhering to a shared schema. by the grace of everything holy this was…
in my summer software engineering course we’re making a website of information about world crises using django . we were experiencing some trouble with deploying our apps. the original setup was a single university-hosted apache instance with [mod_wsgi][] loaded and configured in our local directories using .htaccess files. it’s difficult to administer a system in which you have limited privileges…
i’m in an undergrad software engineering course right now, even though i’ve been a professional software engineer for four years (long story i guess…). it’s interesting to see all of my classmates that will be starting their first development jobs in the next year or two. it makes me think of when i was trying to choose between job offers right out of school. on one hand it’s really exciting; on…
i think my summer software engineering course is excellent. i’ve written a couple posts that may suggest otherwise, but those are just details. if you’re going to pay someone to teach you how to program, you’ll won’t do better than ut’s cs373 . so i think the best part really has to be the professor though. they say there’s a big difference in effectiveness between the best and worst programmers,…
this week in my software engineering course we covered a number of topics including pair programming. we had to read three different texts , all of which extolled the practice, and we were assigned a project where we actually engaged in pair programming. after all of this, i think the arguments fall short. if pair programming is as great as these sources claim, then why is it so rare in the…
the first project for my software engineering class at UT was to submit solutions for the collatz conjecture to a system called sphere which judges the output and ranks everyone’s results. the project was focused more on good engineering practices like testing and documentation than the problem itself. i managed to get second place on the all-time best list for python 2.7 , and the individual…
one of the supervisors at my first job out of college had a saying: the code is only as good as the developer standing behind it so far i think that’s the only thing that has remained true since i’ve been doing this…
if you’re a client-side developer and you’ve had the chance to spend any time doing node.js development, it’s easy to appreciate the module system. suddenly you don’t have to care that package A depends on B depends on C, etc. you just require() the code you need, and everything is cool. if you’re going the other way, from environments like node, ruby, python, etc. to the client-side, you’re…
"triangles" — or — "the shape of an application" by Aaron Stacy on 29 August, 2012 mvc has become a bit of a buzzword </understatement>. it’s a complicated, nuanced concept, and even if you’re using an mvc framework, it’s easy to get wrong. a year and a half ago i was interviewing for my first job as a web developer, and the question came up: what is mvc design? i probably regurgitated something i…