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Two weeks of mentoring Exercism
I'm wrapping up my second week of mentoring on Exercism, and my only complaint is that it's taken many hours to review the number of solutions pouring in, whereas I'd just expected an hour or two per...
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How to select an earlier .NET version on Visual Studio for Mac (tl;dr: you...
I saw an implementation of some C# code this week that looked like it should work, but wasn't producing the expected results for me using .NET 4.6. I thought I'd setup a local project in Visual Studio...
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A few thoughts on date/time handling in Erlang
Ask any programmer who's been at it awhile what their biggest aggravations are, and I'd bet handling dates and times is nearly always in the top 5. I'm just getting off of a week or so of standardizing...
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Prepping for a first time aquarium ("The Plan")
My kids have been asking for a pet for awhile now, so I started looking into something that's fun but manageable. Dogs are great, but it's like having a toddler that sheds fur for 15 years. We need...
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Don't be too quick to blame... it's rarely that simple
We all know people who are quick to throw blame around. When they find a problem, their instinct is to find the culprit - and make it clear who isn't to blame! Having worked as a programmer for quite...
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Trouble downloading the Windows 10 ISO - Message Code 715-123130
I was trying to do something that's been relatively simple on the Internet up till now - downloading a file. Somehow Microsoft messed that up and I got an error message every time I tried downloading...
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Querying Amazon's product details with the Amazon Product Advertising API
After researching a few items on Amazon recently, and scouring through hundreds of customer questions, I thought it might be nice to find a way to extract a product's question and answer section for...
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Setting up the aquarium - Month 1
Last month, I wrote about my plan for prepping our first aquarium. I didn't want to just buy whatever (although part of me did after overthinking everything), so I did a lot of research beforehand. One...
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The 5 Stages of Debugging Grief
I've spent enough time programming to know that a large chunk of the work most of us will ever do is debugging. We'll debug our own code, our team's code, some other team's code, the guy or gal who...
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Hosting a GitHub wiki on Ubuntu (and keeping it in sync)
I've always been a fan of wikis for documentation and record-keeping. I even keep an instance of Dokuwiki running on DigitalOcean for personal notes, and before that I had Confluence running on a spare...
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5 Cool markdown tricks for GitHub
If you frequently use GitHub, then you know any directory with a Readme markdown file in it automagically displays it, making it a convenient place to let visitors know helpful information about a...
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When PrismJs doesn't play nice with your Ghost blog
That's right. It's a prism.. melting a ghost.I realized recently that none of the code snippets on my Ghost blog were displaying syntax highlighting, which used to work thanks to Prism.js. When did it...
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Common Dialyzer Errors and Solutions in Erlang
When you're dealing with a dynamically typed language like Erlang, any effort to tame the beast can pay off in spades. I'm currently focused on an Erlang app that has zero Dialyzer specs in it, so...
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10 great web comics for the nerdy among us
Who couldn't use a little light-heartedness in their day? Or dry humor if that's what you're looking for? Or something educational in an easy to digest format?I read quite a bit, but a picture's worth...
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How do you find the URL for a cloned git repo?
As part of a project I'm working on, I've had to clone a lot of repos. Like, several hundred repos. Many of them work together, in small and large projects, some are shared resources for all, and still...
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Using the IP Geolocation API to find info about an IP address
I remember reading an article on dev.to last year, called To 30 Billion and Beyond, about a simple to use and completely free service called ipify (source code) that returns your current IP address in...
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Gems, NuGet, CI, and the Ghost Content API v2.0
This was a week of firsts. It started with having to add some tests for a new feature to one of our many test suites at work, and finding the logic we'd need for those new tests were spread across...
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When an assert isn't assertive enough (or using the wrong macro in an EUnit...
I stumbled on an unexpected surprise in Erlang today, while I was cleaning up some EUnit tests. Not a tax refund surprise or a surprise birthday though... more like a bag full of crap on your front...
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What makes a doc site great (or not)? The good, the meh, and the just plain...
We all spend a good portion of time reading documentation? As employees, techies, owners of techie doohickies, as human beings... We're usually hoping to get in, find what we need quickly, and get on...
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How to enable Flash for a single Chrome or Opera browser Extension
I tried to load the YoWindow extension in Opera today, which is a nice weather app except for the fact they're still using Flash instead of HTML5. Not for long, as Adobe plans to end support in 2020.To...
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