A sporadically updated website by Bryan English (@bengl)
Note: This article first appeared on dev.to In diagnosing memory leaks , one of the most useful tools in a developer’s aresenal is the heap dump, or heap snapshot, which gives us insight into what objects are allocated on the JavaScript, and how many of them. The Old Way Traditionally, in Node.js, we’ve had two options for creating heap dumps. Using the heapdump module. Attaching a Chrome DevTools…
Note: This article first appeared on dev.to Earlier this year, I was working on optimizing a data path inside a Node.js library that creates a bunch of data, encodes it to MessagePack, then sends it off to an HTTP server. I thought that maybe we could do some interesting things in native code that would be harder to do in JavaScript, like an optimized MessagePack encoder, and less-costly…
Note: This article first appeared on dev.to First… Butts Let’s talk about butts. Specifically horse butts. There’s a story that’s been going around the Internet, probably since its inception, about how the dimensions of spaceship parts are indirectly derived from the width of a horse’s butt. The short version is something like this: Roman chariots were typically pulled by two horses. Therefore…
PLEASE SEE THE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM For about a week and a few hours (almost exactly as long as the US government shutdown), I’ve been without Facebook. I took the plunge and deactivated my Facebook account. For those who don’t know, deactivation is not permanent. My account can be reactivated at any time by simply logging in. I’m not the first person to get on the quit-Facebook train, nor are my…
A rekindled interest in PGP (due in part to recent revelations about the NSA) led me to perusing public keyservers for people I know. After clicking around a bit, I found that there is a reasonably large number of people who share the folowing characteristics: They all have stripe.com email addresses (implying that they work at Stripe ). Many of them have signed each other’s keys, forming a tight…
I don’t want to restrict people to Facebook for comments, so as of this post, comments are now hosted by Disqus . I’m open to suggestions though. If there’s a better commenting system I can add without any backend work and allows authentication through multiple providers (including email), then I might be open to switch. I don’t often get comments, so this isn’t really a big deal, but I’d still…
PLEASE SEE THE UPDATES AT THE BOTTOM I’d like to talk about my first car. The thing is, I haven’t had a first car. Sure I’ve driven a bunch of cars before, but I’ve never owned them. It’s always been either my parents’, my employers’, friends’ or car-sharing cars. However, I’m fairly certain that I’ve now driven what will be my first car. This weekend, I went to a Tesla store and did a test drive…
PLEASE SEE THE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM I’ve been working on a project of mine for the past few days that I had previously neglected. It’s called Beats.IO , and it’s a fun little tool for making music by writing code. Backstory A whole bunch of years ago, I read an article called Hacking Perl in Nightclubs . I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It introduced me to something called live-coding, and…
PLEASE SEE THE UPDATE AT THE BOTTOM I love ANSI escape sequences. You can use them to add color to your terminal apps, which I think is all kinds of awesome. I like to throw them anywhere and everywhere, since they’re so simple and easily add a bit of readability to output or even input. For example, many people’s first experience with ANSI colors is by using Vim. Vim has great support for syntax…
WARNING : Don’t try this at home. This not medical advice. In fact it’s probably bad for you. Don’t do this, or any other random diet idea you find on the Internet without consulting experts. It’s 2021 now, and 9 years ago was a very different time for me. I would not do this again. On August 21, while having dinner at a local restaurant, a conversation about health and diet erupted between me and…