Clik here to view.
Twitter... bring on the chaos. Or not.
Everything that's happened with Facebook recently (the culmination of a slow-motion, decade-long train wreck) has me thinking a lot about social media in general - and the social media I use most,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hiding Travis CI logos between page loads
I'm getting increasingly annoyed by all the cutesy distractions and nonsense we bloat technology with, from ascii art littered throughout log files, to animated doodles on a simple search. For the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Calibre is awesome... Calibre Server is NOT
For a long time, I've been using Calibre to keep my e-books and other electronic documents organized (epub, pdf, etc). I've used the desktop clients for both Windows and OSX, and while it's a little...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Thoughts on Stir Trek 2018
If you're anywhere near Columbus OH during the first week of May, the Stir Trek conference is worth spending a day. The price went up to $125 this year, but it includes a lot of sessions to choose...
View ArticleAre property accessors possible in Erlang records?
I ran into a problem in Erlang yesterday that made me think: Is there anyway to implement a property accessor on a record? I was tackling a new story, which required a new record. One of the fields is...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Do I need to fill in all the details on a self-signed certificate?
What's a self-signed certificate? If you somehow ended up here and aren't sure what a self-signed certificate is, or whether you should create and use one, check out this great description of signed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
My first experience with AWS Lambda (by taming Twitter)
Being a minimalist When my wife and I married and moved into our first home 13 years ago, I brought two boxes of "stuff" along with some clothes, a computer and a bike. That's it. Sure I've accumulated...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Using AWS Lambda to tweet random blog posts from Ghost
If you've got a Twitter account, and a blog with a lot of content, sharing your posts from time to time can be a nice way to drive a little extra traffic to your site. Plus, sharing your experience and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Using AWS Lambda to tweet random blog posts from an RSS feed
Following on the heels of writing a small app to tweet random posts from a Ghost blog using AWS Lambda, I thought I'd write a similar implementation that operated on an RSS feed instead of specifically...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Getting rid of unused function errors when using timers in Erlang
Have you ever tried to execute a function at some future time in Erlang? You can, with the timer:apply_after (and related) functions, but you're likely to run into an error when compiling. Let's say...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Writing a random selection algorithm that factors in age (weighted selection)
Random Selection Have you ever had a collection of items and needed to select a random one from the lot? That's easy enough in most languages, since they generally provide a way to generate a random...
View ArticleClik here to view.
If you look around and can't find the expert, it's you
I've spent the last few weeks improving the integration between one of our products and a third-party service, and it's been a little slower going than I'd like. Several times, I'd be cruising along,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A look at the many ways APIs can authorize access
When you encounter an API that gives you access to some data - maybe yours (tweets, photos), maybe someone else's (space photos, climate stats) - you'll usually encounter some form of required...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Access yesterday's Internet with the Wayback Machine API
Today I'm checking out the Wayback Machine APIs from the Internet Archive. If you haven't heard of the IA before, it's a site that's aiming to... well.. archive everything. They're probably best known...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How to calculate Easter (and other holidays) in Erlang
On a whim, I created an Erlang module for calculating various holidays, and things were going well until it came to Easter. Have you ever tried to calculate Easter? It's surprisingly difficult. Easter...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When does one equal two equal three?
I stumbled on a post where someone asked how a single variable could hold three different values, apparently simultaneously? There were some clever answers in there, but one answer really caught my eye...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How do I convert my code from C# to VB.NET (or from VB.NET to C#)?
If you work with the .NET Framework long enough, you may eventually find yourself tasked with converting one .NET language to another. There are hundreds of questions on Stack Overflow for converting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
I joined Exercism.io as a mentor
The only thing more exciting than learning something new is telling someone else about it... or better yet, showing them. I see it with my kids all the time - "Hey, Dad, look at me. Look what I did....
View ArticleMaking the mentoring process on Exercism a little more efficient
I just joined Exercism as a mentor a week ago, in the C# track, and after reviewing a dozen or so solutions I've started automating parts of the mentoring experience. Not any part that involves...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Comments are not evil
I'm not talking about general comments found across the web - those frequently suck and I even wrote an extension to hide them all. No, I'm talking about comments in code, which (done right) are...
View Article