Giving a Talk Over Zoom
I finally worked out how to overlay slides and stand up while giving a talk online
Pragdave & the Coding Gnome
Home of (Pragmatic) Dave Thomas: pragdave. Here you'll find the Coding Gnome courses, articles on Ruby, Elixir, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, talks, and interviews.
Latest posts
The Interview
The start of a screenplay about the ridiculous state of programmer job interviews.
Learning a New Language (or anything, really…)
One of my students emailed me privately. She wanted to learn a new language over the summer, but she has “always had trouble finding structure and knowing what to learn when pursuing independent studies such as these.” I’ve had this same question a number of times in the past, so I thought it might be useful to post my response.
Running RT-11 and Macro-11
The first five years of my professional career were spent programming PDP-11s, mostly in assembler. This turned out to be a good thing: not only because I learned a lot about how machines work, but also because I was lucky enough to do it on a PDP.
Where Does State Live?
Several people have questioned my description of when you should use dynamic components:
Small is Beautiful—The Component Library
For a while now I’ve been doing my Cassandra impersonation, telling everyone who’ll listen (and quite a few folks who won’t) that we need to be writing code in smaller chunks. I know what happens when we don’t, as I was the author of one of the largest early Rails applications (65kloc), and it became a nightmare to work with.
How I Manage The Configuration of My Environment
Like many people I have an automated scheme for setting up a new machine. My students have bugged me to write it up.
Using Components to Build a Real World Elixir Assembly
In which I find out whether my ideas about using components have any merit.
Running Elixir Tests in Visual Studio Code/ElixirLS
My configuration for running Elixir project tests with a keystroke.
Elixir Project Structure
Enough already with project templates that look like the 1960's org chart for MegaCorp