A man's online ramblings.
I’ve recently been going over my old posts here. I only vaguely remember why I ever started this blog, way back in 2012: I had just started my first full-time software engineering gig and wanted somewhere to dump my thoughts. Maybe I’m wondering what this blog means to me now. It’s slightly embarrassing, reading back […]
Minimal Distance to Pi is one of HackerRank’s hard-rated maths problems – with only a ~17% success rate at the time of posting. In this post, I hope to ELI5 some of the maths that will help in finding a solution to this problem. The main building blocks we’ll be exploring are continued fractions, convergents […]
Following this proud tradition of posting brain-dumps, this post is – and the ideas contained within are – somewhat of a work-in-progress and subject to change. There’s an adage one may encounter in the OOP world: Make everything private unless you have a specific reason not to. Some purists will even go one step further […]
Recently I’ve spent more time than usual thinking about software architecture, OOP design and such – and figured it might be worth writing some of it down – for whatever purpose that may serve. I have no particular structure in mind for this post – so if it is still a jumbled mess by the […]
As a preface, I’d like to say that this article isn’t intended to help people cheat at the problem, but is posted for the intellectual exercise contained within. Hopefully the folks in and around the HackerRank community won’t mind. Lately I’ve been having some fun with the challenges on HackerRank. By all accounts, the general (and […]
For a while now (and by “while” I mean 5+ years) I’ve been wanting to create a web comic. By some miracle I have taken the first step towards that goal and set up a Tumblr blog to host said strips. For those who are interested, the URL is http://newphalls.tumblr.com/. I’ll probably also be pestering my Twitter followers […]
Not too long ago, admiring the craftsmanship of the Kritonios Crown got me thinking about the various ways in which people have taken a particular skill – such as painting, sculpting, smithy, writing, etc – and turned it into art. While plenty has been said about computer programming having artistic undertones, I began to wonder […]
Continuing my quest to explore the idea of using Julia for web development, I wanted to address some of my own questions around performance and implementation. My two biggest concerns were: Should Julia web pages be served by a Julia HTTP server (such as HttpServer.jl) – or would it be better to have Julia work […]
In an earlier post, I explored one approach to emulating bundling functionality with the data on which it operates, akin to object methods in OOP languages such as C# and PHP. A comment posted by Matthew Browne questioned whether this approach was compatible with Julia’s multiple dispatch. This is something I thought about at the time of writing the original article, but […]
As is typical for many languages, assigning one variable to another in Julia does not create a copy of the variable data, but rather a reference to the existing data. However, I learned the hard way whilst working on the CGI module that Julia does not currently support a copy-on-write mechanism for collections. Take the example code […]