A nerdy blog by Stephen Ball focusing on Elixir, Go, TypeScript, shell scripts, and other cool weird stuff. Some posts researched with LLM but all writing...
A history degree was always a cheat code for being a high level software engineer, but large language models have turned it into even more of a superpower. The original case: programming is mostly narrative Most people think programming is about writing code. After a few years in the industry, you realize programming is mostly about figuring out what’s going on. A bug report says one thing. The…
From Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover my takeaway is that on any of my Ruby projects I’d absolutely use Spinel and stay far away from rubygems.org. It’s a sad state that a core part of the Ruby ecosystem has been taken over by private parties and taken away from the community. The video from Ruby Central to try and qualify their recent actions is…
I was browsing around the Kagi small web and found that I was on a blog powered by Bear. A couple things caught my eye. The blog was nice, readable, and fast enough to be a fine human experience. The little bear unicode logo at the bottom was adorable. I've been feeling more of a spark of annoyance than a spark of joy maintaining my own stack of blogging lately. While I love having the capability…
Kicking off a blog post series of curated programming videos. The Soul of Erlang and Elixir If you only watch one programming video, watch this one. Don't write Erlang or Elixir? It doesn't matter. You should watch this talk and at least understand the kinds of systems that are possible. This is not a talk trying to sell anything except an understanding of the reliability and failure tolerance…
This is a followup to my previous post explaining how I initially wrote Mowing — a multiplayer "Minesweeper" clone with a gardening theme. You can find them in the games menu in their multiplayer and single player forms: Mowing (narrow, solo) Mowing (narrow, multiplayer) Mowing (wide, solo) Mowing (wide, multiplayer) What changed? The single player versions work as they always have. But…
How to implement Conway's Game of Life using functional programming.
Context? Be me. Be looking for some first project to use to integrate LiveView-based apps and games into your blogging site, Strange Leaflet. Be inspired by the excellent Mines vs Humanity . Let's make that kind of experience using Phoenix LiveView! First off, LiveView? LiveView's entire deal is that it is a framework to create web applications that maintain a persistent connection from the…
Another rewrite of Strange Leaflet? Yes! Still with the power of Svelte but now with Phoenix on the backend.
Let's run Kafka in Kubernetes using Minikube and then connect to a topic using kcat running on our host machine.
"Why and how I'm writing my personal blog in SvelteKit instead of a backend like Phoenix."