Recent content on Stephen Searles
I’m working on a plugin to caddy that hooks in hugo with a more tailored interface than its predecessor. The code is at: git.stephensearles.com/stephen/caddy-hugo2. I wrote a bit about why I chose to do this on the blog it was originally meant for, danandstephen.net, but I’m going to elaborate a little more here. The thought process went roughly like this: The requirements: Easy for me…
Upfront, I’m going to point out that I have a horse in this race. In my experience, I’ve been bitten by gnarly, expensive code one too many times. That said, there’s been a few posts recently trying to suss out the difference between the two. One of the pithy phrases that’s been going around: A framework calls your code, you call a library. This is so tempting, because it paints such a bright…
Useful info for new Gophers A couple folks have had some questions for me about getting started with Go. I’m going to outline some of my favorite links for people to get familiar with the language and its fine idioms. First stop: the Go tour. It takes roughly five hours and is a remarkably complete introduction to the structure of the language. Critical documents: The spec. It is well written and…
This will be a page I’ll revise from time to time: See here
There’s a lot of PHP out there. The problems plaguing that language are well documented, but many companies and projects are frightfully entrenched. There have recently been projects aimed at improving performance and reliability: things like Hack, php-ng, and the recent effort toward a language specification. Unfortunately, none of these projects will directly result in improving large, existing…
TL;DR: Martini makes Go magic, but the whole point of Go is to be simple and not magic. It’s the wrong direction for the language and ecosystem, so try something like muxchain instead. Sorry codegangsta; I really tried to write this post without calling out Martini, but the point just wasn’t coming across. Martini has gained a tremendous amount of attention in a short time. I think it might have…
I recently found instructions from Dave Cheney on installing godoc as a launch agent in OS X. It’s really cool to have Go’s documentation running locally and to have the system ensure it’s always running for you, but I realized you can get it to display your own packages as well. It’s insanely helpful to have documentation auto-generated for my packages that are consistent with and as nice as the…
I’ve put a bit of time into the Park and Ride Maps app over the past few weeks. I pushed the latest update tonight. You can try it here: http://stephensearles.com/parkandride. Other than a few stylistic changes, you’ll see I added a way for you to specify a park and ride stop. I found the app was not proving very useful for many of my searches because it just wasn’t finding great data for transit…
I released park and ride directions about a week ago. It’s a work in progress, but it definitely works in some cases. A few improvements I plan to make: The data source (Google Places API) doesn’t have every station listed, so I would like to modify the app to allow users to enter their own Park and Ride station. They’ll get directions using it, but then the new station will also be added to the…
I did some thinking about managing such a big project like Chrome when it depends on such a big project like Webkit. Tons of Chrome bugs are actually Webkit bugs, or are related to Webkit bugs somehow, much like the one I encountered in my previous post. The Google Code project hosting doesn’t seem to have a great way to manage external bug dependencies not on Google Code as of yet, so I took it…
So I recently became an author of Chromium. I fixed a very minor bug, one that’s sort of overshadowed by a larger one. I’ll get back to the specifics, but I’d like to first say, what a fun experience. Chromium is definitely the largest project I’ve ever contributed to, mostly because I’ve avoided it. Learning the process, getting acclimated to a huge code base; these are things I’ve needlessly…
Git is incredibly handy for moving work around to different machines, so a reasonable thing to consider is actually deploying a website to your server. I’ve done this in a few different ways, but this is a simple recipe to accomplishing the task. In these steps, I assume you’ve already SSH’d into the server and you know where your web root is. On the server, outside of the web root: mkdir myRepo.
I recently switched to Chrome in celebration of Tyler joining the Chrome team at Google, and it’s been really great. The Omnibox is perhaps one of the best features, but the experience out of the box did leave some things lacking. As a user, I often visit websites and bookmark them to save them for later reference, or I don’t, and I just expect to be able to find it in the browser history.
Through all the protest around SOPA, one tweet prompted thoughts about the overarching role of technology: The motivation behind this statement reflects a systemic misunderstanding of the Internet’s role in our dramatically changing society. It seems to me that it is either a refusal to adapt or an ignorance of the need. The academic exercise this tweet describes has, in some respects, become…
I recently (mostly) finished a transition to a new server. I came from a free web host that was pretty good, but had some significant limitations (mainly in PHP, but also that I was limited to software they provided). Now I have my own VPS. I struggled a bit getting set up, but now I’m much better from it. To someone getting started on this kind of project anew as I did, here’s a few pieces of…
After a long while, I finally have a working version of WebIAT online. I originally developed this for some cool folks over at the UCLA Anderson School of Management: Geoff Ho and Margaret Shih, but they graciously agreed to open source the work so I can continue working on it. The software manages and runs Implicit Association Tests. These experiments, pioneered by Anthony Greenwald, determine a…
At the start of this blog, I would like to take a moment to outline my own expectations for what I plan to do here. The thought to start a website at all came from a need for a place to publish code and demos online. Done. Registered the domain and there’s already a bit of code here. The bigger question, though, is what can I do with this here website?