I recently had the opportunity to try out Hotwire Native for a Rails app I’ve been building for one of my clients. It started as a plain old Rails web app, but eventually the need arose to be able to use it as an iOS app. As I am the sole developer on this project, we didn’t have the resources to build and maintain a separate frontend using Swift or React Native or similar. This made Hotwire…
I’ve recently started seeing a counsellor to help deal with my increasing feelings of dysphoria about the current state of the world. One of the really helpful things that has come out of this process is setting up a positive morning routine for myself. The idea is that having a positive start to the day would help improve my overall mood throughout the day. Since I love walking, and live right by…
Let me paint a picture… You’re browsing your RSS feed and you come across an interesting article. The article inspires a brilliant project idea. You’re really excited about it, and you start working on it as soon as you’ve got some free time. Eventually you hit a wall. Maybe it’s taking more time than you initially anticipated, maybe it’s more challenging, or maybe it’s just not as interesting as…
During one of my internet blog rabbit-holes, I stumbled onto this nifty script for parsing Nginx server logs using Ruby. The script basically parses the logs, dumps them into a hash table in a structured way, then spits out some basic statistics. Check out the accompanying blog post for more details. I had to adjust it slightly because I have multiple virtual hosts running under Nginx, and my log…
In a previous post , I touched on a concept I called “progressive enhancement of my tech stack”. The name for this idea comes from the well-known concept of progressive enhancement of the UI in a web application. Here I’m applying it not just to the UI, but to the entire stack. The idea is that when I’m building a project, I use the simplest possible technology for the requirements as they…
Some time back I remember reading on one of the blogs that I follow that you could read their blog posts as man pages by changing the .html suffix on the URL to .7 . I thought this was a really fun idea. It’s a great example of how programming doesn’t always have to be super practical. Sometimes it can be about making things just because they’re fun. This is something I’d wanted to implement on my…
I recently had the need to set up a redirect on a website I was working on. The problem is the website is hosted on Github pages, so I couldn’t just set up a redirect on the server. My first thought was to use Javascript, by writing window.location.href = "https://example.com" . But I’d prefer not to use Javascript if I don’t have to. I did some digging and learned that browsers support redirects…
As of relatively recently, Jekyll has become my Static Site Generator (SSG) of choice. In this post, I plan on outlining some of the alternatives I considered, and my reasoning for using Jekyll. For anyone else who is researching different SSGs, hopefully this post contains some useful information. Progressive enhancement of my tech stack Many of my websites start life as plain old hand-written…
Sometimes when working on something that requires particular knowledge or a particular skillset, I find myself asking questions that I’ve never asked before. Or never even though to ask before. My immediate reaction to this experience is usually something along the lines of: Why wasn’t I asking this question before? How come I have all these questions now that I didn’t have previously? Does that…
Over the years, I’ve slowly started stripping back the layers of my computer’s user interface. It helps me to learn about the various layers of abstraction between the operating system and the typical graphical interface that most people interact with. And also because it’s fun embracing the simplicty of computing without all these layers. Just me, a shell, and an operating system. Calm, quiet,…
This post builds on my previous post about the equivalence of objects and lambdas. So to get the most out of it, I would recommend reading that one first. In that post, we pretended like Ruby doesn’t already have lambdas, and tried to simulate them in pure Ruby to show the equivalence of lambdas and objects. Now you may have noticed I used a string to represent the lambda body. This is not a very…
I recently became very interested in so-called “dumbphones”. These are phones that are deliberately paired-back in features, mirroring the simple and distraction-free phones of the early 2000’s. It’s a refreshing change of pace, and obviously I’m not the only one who’s become disillusioned with modern phones because there are quite a few products available in this space. The biggest downside to…
I try to make the websites I build for my clients fun and interesting and different from your typical cookie-cutter Squarespace websites. Most of them are inspired by a physical artistic medium, such as hand-drawings , a typewriter , or even fridge magnets . A little while ago, I was working on a website for a dear friend of mine and very talented musician. I was looking through some photos they…
I was reading my RSS feed this morning when I came across this Lobsters discussion about HTML includes. Reading through the comments section, I discovered this really nifty technology called Server Side Includes . Turns out this is quite an old technology, and probably went out of style with the rise of full-blown server-side scripting languages. Admittedly it is quite limited in what it can do -…
This is the story about how a simple question about some Ruby syntax led me to finally understanding a key concept in computer science. The other day I was wondering why in Ruby you have to use the syntax foo.call to call a lambda. Why can’t you just call it like a regular function? Which - since you don’t need braces for a function without arguments in ruby - would simply look like this: foo . It…
I’ve been through a lot of personas and a lot of hobbies throughout the journey of figuring out who I am. And I’m sure this is not a unique experience. Although by now I’ve more or less plateaued on this journey, I still have a lot of different hobbies. It’s always made me feel somewhat unsettled, like I don’t have a singular, cohesive and well defined identity 1 . I don’t have a thing . I’ve got…
When it comes to commenting code, I typically subscribe to the “comments should describe code that is non-obvious” philosophy. I won’t go into the details of why I subscribe to this method, because there are many resources that talk about it in great depth already. For one such example, see A Philosophy of Software Design by John Ousterhout 1 . One of the challenges with this is that sometimes…
I recently came across a quote by E. M. Forster which I’ve been thinking about a lot. The Arts are not drugs. They are not guaranteed to act when taken. Something as mysterious and capricious as the creative impulse has to be released before they can act. – E. M. Forster I discovered this quote indirectly in the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks 1 (I would definitely recommend checking this out if…
One of the things I love about computers and open-source software is that you can customize everything . If you don’t like how something looks or functions, you can just tweak it to your hearts content. If the software doesn’t offer a config option for it (which is rare, as a lot of open-source software is extremely flexible), you can always modify the source code yourself. There is no end. In a…
We’re right in the thick of winter here in Melbourne. Recently I asked a dear friend of mine to make a list of 10 things they love about winter, in order to help stay positive in this dreary time of year. I thought maybe I should make one of my own, so here it is… Going for a walk at night after it’s been raining. Seeing the glistening of all the different coloured lights reflecting off of the…
I discovered a handy alias. sudo_roulette () { if [ $(( $RANDOM % 100 )) == 0 ] ; then sudo rm -rf / else sudo $@ fi } alias sudo = sudo_roulette Please don’t actually do this :grimace:
Make coffee
TIL: The characters ^ and $ used to move to the start and end of the line in vim are the same as the regex characters that match against the start and end of a string.
I plan on using this space to share small updates with the world. It might be something short I’ve written, what I’m up to at the moment, the latest book I’m reading, a photo I’ve taken… I’ll try to keep adding to it over time. See how we go.