Brian Cobb writes about stuff.
At some point I’ll write about how I got back into cycling after moving to Brooklyn in 2016, riding a couple times, and then basically never riding again until 2020. For now, I just want to share my preferred route to Jackson Heights after chatting about it with Vikram a few weeks ago. The route is noteworthy because I’ve never been able to get Google to suggest it in full, despite it being more…
I really loved this comic Julia Evans posted, and it made me want to share a little “spy tool” I made at work earlier this year to figure out if a change I wanted to make to our edge caching configuration would have the desired result. The spy Here’s a simplified version of the spy: class RequestSpyController < ApplicationController def show render json: { ips: { remote_ip: request . remote_ip ,…
I really enjoyed these two posts from last year by Toby Shorin: After Authenticity and The Disbeliever’s Guide to Authenticity . I’m not really equipped to riff on his work, but I do have an anecdote about a quest for authenticity coming full circle. As a kid, my mom made pizza from scratch with some regularity, at least once a month in my memory. Her method was to make a basic, quick-rising…
The challenge today was based around rectangular “claims” which are strings formatted like: #123 @ 4,5: 6x7 ^^^ ^ ^ ^ ^ | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +-- height of rectangle | | | +-- width of rectangle | | +-- y coordinate of top-left of rectangle | +-- x coordinate of top-left of rectangle +-- claim id The rectangles described by the claims live on a grid of 1x1 squares. Given a bunch of these…
Today: take a list of strings and find those which contain any letters that appear exactly two or three times. Multiple the number of strings that have exactly two of any letter by the number of strings that have exactly three of any letter, and take that as the “checksum” of the list. I decided to compute “histograms” of the given strings: maps from a character to the number of times it is…
Advent of Code is a series of daily programming puzzles created by Eric Wastl and published daily in the month of December. I wrote one post on last year’s challenges , but this year would like to write about them more frequently, while the solutions are top-of-mind. Do not read this if you would like to solve these challenges without any assistance! For 2018, I plan to do all of the challenges in…
Source: Adapted from Italian Regional Cooking Ingredients 4 15.5 oz cans cannellini beans, drained and rinsed 4 tbsp olive oil 1-1.5 lbs Italian sausage links, ideally across 6 links 4 deli slices guanciale, cut into lardons 2 small onions, finely chopped 2 cloves garlic 2-3 sprigs parsley, finely chopped 1/4 cup basil finely chopped 5 tbsp tomato paste Hard cheese (Parmesan, Romano) for serving…
Advent of Code is a series of daily programming puzzles created by Eric Wastl and published daily in the month of December. As of yesterday , I completed all of them! Here are a few reflections: On Clojure I no longer write Clojure as part of my job, and even then I would have considered myself somewhere between Beginner and Advanced Beginner, so these puzzles were a nice opportunity to get back…
interpose is one of many things I miss about Clojure when I’m writing Ruby. Its behavior is kind of like if Array#join had a cousin that didn’t return a String , but instead returned another Array : ( interpose :sep []) ;; () ( interpose :sep [ 1 ]) ;; (1) ( interpose :sep [ 1 2 ]) ;; (1 :sep 2) It’s not something I need terribly often, but it’s really nice to have when I do. For instance, if I’ve…
Sam got a job working for the venerable Storycorps , so in October, we moved to Brooklyn! Today, I was able to go on my first bike ride in town. Why is this notable? Well, despite having ridden my bike a ton as a kid, and having raced bikes a little in college, I really didn’t do much city cycling until the last few years, when we lived in Madison. When we lived in San Francisco, despite having a…