Miguel Fonseca. Engineer at Automattic. Code, languages, headbanging.
A while ago I stumbled upon a blog post from Ploum.net (in French) which presented a puzzle that involved decoding some Baudot code. The author tackled it using the UNIX command line, which is right up my alley. Why is it up my alley? Pressed for self-knowledge, I think there are two forces at play — forces almost diametrically Continue reading "Transposing matrices and other mischief"
This post has been sitting as a forgotten draft since WC Lisbon, over a year and a half ago. Posting on this site after such a long dry spell feels unavoidably uncomfortable, but at this point any post will have to do. A reminder that xargs is often all you need when splitting large operations Continue reading "Batching tasks with xargs"
In day 6 of the 2019 Advent of Code edition, we are presented with a system of objects orbiting in space. All objects orbit the center of mass of the system (modeled as object COM), either directly or by orbiting a larger object. These chains of orbits can be solved as a directed graph. It Continue reading "Awkward solutions to Advent of Code challenges"
I just watched one of Gary Bernhardt s excellent screencasts, Tar, Fork and the Tar Pipe. It s a succinct and powerful overview of key Unix concepts and I highly recommend watching it. If you re new to Unix, it can be an eye-opening, refreshing look at computing. If you re seasoned, Bernhardt s fine execution is still a delight to watch. While on that Continue reading "Jobs and pipes"
From The Guardian s Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound, in which we will ignore—however true—the zeitgeist tropes of propensity to demagogy and loss of empathy, we can consider the following: Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension: physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the Continue reading "Cognition and the Internet"
Or: The List Monad Last year, I introduced monads under a more “intuitive” light—focus was placed on the semantics of monads rather than formal definitions, turning to the Maybe monad as a first contact. The following assumes the reading of said article. When discussing functions and monads, we leaned on the analogy of a box that contained our values—an object Continue reading "Superposition…
I recently stumbled upon The Lost Art of the Makefile. It was a timely find, in that I too had been circling back to make and the article expresses some of my opinions. It s a tool that is not only still relevant, but, I argue, more enjoyable and apt for many scenarios than the modern Continue reading "Make the Web"
The following was co-presented at WordCamp Zaragoza with Matías Ventura and rehashed for an informal presentation with Jorge Costa on the state of Gutenberg with the local Oporto WordPress community. Introduction Gutenberg is the future all-encompassing editor of WordPress, starting with WordPress 5.0. This future promises more than just a replacement of the current TinyMCE-powered Continue…
As we approach the release of WordPress 5.0, which will feature the introduction of the new Gutenberg editor, it is worth taking a look at WordPress s current model in handling user content. A page request Consider the following simplification of the data pipeline for a front-end page request: In it, post_content is read from the Continue reading "Premises of WordPress content handling"
In Rule VIII of Règles pour la Direction de l'Esprit , Descartes writes: Si quelqu'un se propose comme problème d'examiner toutes les vérités pour la connaissance desquelles la raison humaine suffit (examen que doivent faire, ce me semble, au moins une fois dans la vie, tous ceux qui s'efforcent sérieusement de parvenir à la sagesse), il trouvera Continue reading "Descartes s…