Recent blog posts
Background As part of the communication process at work, devs maintain changelogs for some of our projects. What these consist of is a single RELEASE NOTES.md file in the project root, where each each line is a Markdown hyperlink to the pull request that introduced the change. These pull request links are then grouped together by date of release. The changelog looks like: ## v1.7 2013/03/17 *…
Premise: You've got a Windows service that you want to run on a Linux server Problem: Your code is written using the .NET framework and some language that targets the CLR (C#, VB, Clojure-CLR, etc.) Solution: Mono is an open-source implementation of the .NET framework. By installing mono you gain access to a ton of useful stuff, but the relevant item here is the mono-service executable.…
Anil Dash published a blog post today I think is a victim of a bad title: "The Blue Collar Coder." I normally skim over the "Is programming an art, craft or science?" discussions but there were a couple of very smart programmers discussing it on Twitter, and I joined in. During the conversation, I vacillated between agreeing with Anil's proposition and agreeing with Alex Feinberg . I think the…
Updated: So after talking with the author of Tastypie I added the SearchDeclarativeMetaclass and SearchOptions to handle inheritance of the metaclass attributes on SearchResource . I almost entirely copied his ModelDeclarativeMetaclass and it works well. In-house, we further subclass SearchResource to model our job postings data in our search index, and it works great. So, first things first:…
We recently completed a big refactor at work , the intent for which was implementing search for one of our products, a Django-based web CMS called DirectSEO. It did not take long, however, to realize that by choosing Solr as our search backend, we had the opportunity to make some much-needed optimizations. Now, after analyzing three weeks' worth of data related to the refactor, I can say the time…
I posted a very brief response to a post on HackerNews yesterday challenging the notion that 8 weeks of guided tutelage on Ruby on Rails is not going to produce someone who you might consider a "junior RoR developer." It did not garner many upvotes so I figured that like most conversation on the Internet it faded into the general ambient chatter. Imagine my surprise when I woke up to couple…
It's no secret that Google+ is gaining new users as fast as the acceptance pipeline will let invitees click "Make me an account." I love G+, and am thrilled that someone has finally, IMO, smashed Facebook's reign as top dog. There's been a poverty of choice for years when it comes to the social stuff. Google has hit it out of the park. If you are undecided about trying out G+, do it. It's well…
I won't bury the lead: About a month ago, I got my first job as a programmer after years of working in PR and marketing. As I noted here , I spent this spring a "stay-at-home dad," and spent practically every waking moment becoming a better programmer, with the intent of joining the ranks of professional hackers and getting an awesome job making awesome things. Well, a few days after my last blog…
I'm recovering from an obsession with Chebyshev polynomials . Despite the fancy title and somewhat-intimidating definition, Chebyshev polynomials are actually a fantastic shortcut -- relative to what we're taught from the book -- to factoring out trigonometric double-angle problems like cos(6x) . I was originally going to write a script that calculated the Chebyshev polynomials, but when I learned…
After watching and listening my girlfriend wrestling with her course schedule for the fall semester, I got a "big idea" for another project. It's not ready to see the light of day, but suffice it to say it involves a better way of scheduling classes. To start down the road of iterating on my project, I needed data. Specifically, I needed the schedule of every course offered by IUPUI in the fall:…