A collection of Farid's notes
I live in a moderately rural area of Quebec, and we get power outages several times a year. A lot of my neighbours have gas generators that they will turn on when the power goes out. These are loud and stinky, and just kind of ruin the vibe. We’ve always preferred turning the power outage into an adventure, reading by candlelight, playing games, and cooking everything on the barbecue. If it’s…
Last summer I received the very fun HackPack for my birthday. Every 2 months you get a box of parts and assemble a fun hardware project. The first item in the pack was the IR turret. You control the turret with an IR remote, and can shoot the little foam bullets at things. It was pretty cool, but I’m not a huge fan of shooting things. At around the same time I saw this XKCD : I am into going…
When I’m stuck on doing hard things, my brain does something… It will open a new browser tab, and start typing. It will either type “faceboo…” or “news.ycombi…” until I twig into what is happening, but by then it’s too late: I’ve lost the context of what I was working on, and I’m wrapped up in The Scroll. This is a bad situation: I’m an adult! I can do hard things! I’m clearly not the only person…
I just finished my three month stint at the Recurse Center (RC), which I can safely say was one of the most personally fulfilling and joyful experiences I’ve had in a long time. RC is a place where you work at the edge of your abilities, pair program with some extremely smart and caring people, take time for personal introspection and share your knowledge with each other by “learning generously”.…
While reading about trying to get Rust to run in a REPL , I learned that you can send messages between terminals by redirecting to /dev/pts/{num} . For example: echo "hello from 1" 1>/dev/pts/2 Will print “hello from 1” to your second open terminal. You can use this to redirect stderr to a different open terminal if, for example, you have a lot of stdout messages being printed in your original…
I’ve been learning rust recently, and have loved the ease of the dbg! macro which will print and return the value of a given expression, along with the file and line number of where it was called. Since it returns the value of the expression it can be used inline. For example : fn main () { let nums = vec! [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ]; let doubled : Vec < _ > = nums .iter () .map (| x | dbg! ( x * 2 ))…
Today I chose, unwisely to try and get Rust compiled and flashed onto the Arduino Uno R4, which has a Renesas RA4M1 (Arm Cortex-M4) chip. There is a rust hardware abstraction layer crate for this chip, as well as a compile target . I failed spectacularly, and the outcome of my efforts was the ability to get the Arduino into a boot loop. Hooray! I started with the cortex-m quickstart, which…
I’m going to be spending the next 3 months at the Recurse Center , which is like a writers retreat for programmers. I’m quite excited about it. Since I started working as a programmer in 2013, I’ve never actually taken time much time to learn what it means to be a programmer. Before my first job interview, I spent a weekend cramming a web development tutorial, which gave me just enough knowledge…
Strava Link At 235km, this was my longest ride yet. Since I’ve been riding much more this past year, it’s been fun to push myself and see just how far I can go. I’ve started enjoying the much longer rides; 8-9 hours in the saddle gets me to that specific type of zen that is hard to get to otherwise. Also, I was following the Tour Divide a bit closer this year, and watching the racers pull 2-300KM…
How to move the JIRA new comments box above other comments We recently migrated to JIRA from FogBugz to track our work and bugs at Dimagi . One thing that I immediately was frustrated by was the fact that to add a new comment to an issue, you had to scroll all the way to the end of the discussion - even if the comments were sorted with the newest comment first. I wrote a very simple Tampermonkey /…