computer scientists have described a new way to approximate the number of distinct entries in a long list, a method that requires remembering only a small number of entries.
From time to time someone will ask, “Does Culture Amp still use Elm?” I’ll answer privately that no, we are no longer investing in Elm, and explain why. Invariably, they tell me my answer was super valuable, and that I should share it publicly. Until now, I haven’t.
I rebuilt A Strange Kind of Madness using Hugo a month or so ago. As with most photoblogs, it has pages with many images on them, and I was inspired by Photo Stream to load these images lazily.
Creating an event sourced, CQRS application is simple enough conceptually but there is a lot of hidden detail when it comes to building them. There are a couple of event sourcing libraries I’ve used that can help.
I’ve been meaning to work out how to maintain the convenience of the Lodash’s_.chain function whilst only including the parts of Lodash that I actually need.
I use Middleman to build most of my content-focused websites. With the upgrade to version 4 comes the opportunity to move the asset pipeline out to an external provider such as Webpack.
I pulled the pin on working in the React/Redux space a few months ago after I became tired of the churn. Things were moving quickly and I found myself spending more time wiring together framework code than writing application code. This kind of thing sneaks up on you.
At work this past quarter, we painstakingly started three new projects at work. I say “painstakingly” because every project required decisions to be made around tooling depending on the scope & needs.
One of Elm’s goals is to change our relationship with compilers. Compilers should be assistants, not adversaries. A compiler should not just detect bugs, it should then help you understand why there is a bug. It should not berate you in a robot voice, it should give you specific hints that help you write better code. Ultimately, a compiler should make programming faster and more fun!
A while ago I decided to graft React and Flux onto an existing Rails app using Webpack. I opted to avoid hacking on Sprockets and instead used Guard to smooth out the development process.
All of the below properties or methods, when requested/called in JavaScript, will trigger the browser to synchronously calculate the style and layout. This is also called reflow or layout thrashing, and is common performance bottleneck.
Identify and understand tangential topics that software developers frequently fixate on: code formatting, taxonomy, type systems, splitting projects into too many files. Includes detailed study of knee-jerk criticism when exposed to unfamiliar systems.
JavaScript is evolving and new ES2015 and ES2016 editions (previously known as ES6 and ES7, respectively) pack a bunch of new features and Babel makes it very easy to use of them today. These features make some previously essential functions from utility libraries obsolete.
As of today Front Row uses Haskell for anything that needs to run on a server machine that is more complex than a 20 line ruby script. This includes most web services, cron-driven mailers, command-line support tools, applications for processing and validating content created by our teachers and more. We’ve been using Haskell actively in production since 2014.
In this talk, I will explain to you how list folds work using an explanation that is very easy to understand, but most importantly, without sacrificing accuracy.
The Lisp model is that programming is a more general kind of interaction with a machine. The act of describing what you want the machine to do is interleaved with the machine actually doing what you have described, observing the results, and then changing the description of what you want the machine to do based on those observations. There is no bright line where a program is finished and becomes an artifact unto itself.
I use Vim as my text editor and ctags for source code navigation.
I’ve found ctag’s default javascript tagging to be lacking so I’ve added the
following to
my ctags config file
to handle some of the newer ES6 ES2015 syntax such as classes1.
In iOS 8, this code doesn’t just fail, it fails silently. You will get no error or warning, you won’t ever get a location update and you won’t understand why. Your app will never even ask for permission to use location.
When they create 4089 libraries for doing asynchronous programming, they’re trying to cope at the library level with a problem that the language foisted onto them.
Monads are in danger of becoming a bit of a joke: for every person who raves
about them, there’s another person asking what in the world they are, and
a third person writing a confusing tutorial about them. With their
technical-sounding name and forbidding reputation, monads can seem like
a complex, abstract idea that’s only relevant to mathematicians and Haskell
programmers.
Programming well is hard. Here are a few books that have helped me improve that I recommend.
Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz
This contains plenty of great advice even if you don’t code in Ruby. It focusses in on the message passing aspect of OO
and how to structure your code around that ideal whilst keeping it amenable to change.
