TL;DR - By exploiting Webpack’s async loading feature you can roll a feature-gating mechanism in your JavaScript app that only loads the code your end user is supposed to see. This is great for beta testing features and making smaller initial loads. You probably don’t need to do this in your application. Read more about Components á la carte…
A while back I put together a little graphics package written in Racket for generating identicons. This summer someone at work stumbled across it and asked if I could generate some of those identicons in the browser. I decided to give it a shot and whipped up a small subset of the original package in ClojureScript: identikon-cljs Read more about Identicons with ClojureScript…
This weekend I decided to finally bite the bullet and deploy one of my Clojure apps as a JAR. “Certainly” I thought to myself, “there are great tutorials for this online”. Yes, yes there are, except none of them worked for me and in fact did lead to the consumption of some rye whiskey.
Caveats: Every Clojure app is different, and the details of your app will determine the steps necessary to build a JAR. None of the information I found online specifically addressed the problems I had, so I made this post for those who have a similar application with similar needs. YMMV. Read more about Sour Mash: getting your Clojure into a JAR…
I’ve always liked identicons, which WordPress and GitHub have used to great effect. The premise is simple: take a user identifier such as an IP or email address and deterministically convert it into an image based on a simple algorithm. To that I end I started hacking on Identikon - a little Racket program that generates different types of identicons based on rules modules. Read more about Deterministic Pixels…
This post takes a quick look at EventedArray, a small Array-like JavaScript data structure (written in CoffeeScript) that allows you to register callbacks on accessor/mutator operations and also create fixed size buffers. All examples are in JavaScript. Read more about EventedArray: a JavaScript conveyor belt…
TL;DR - Fogus and Jeremy Ashkenas published the underscore-contrib repo recently which is loaded with functional JavaScript goodness based on the popular underscore library. I walk through a few examples of how I use it in the hopes you’ll get interested in working out new ways to solve your own day-to-day issues. Read more about Get Functional with Underscore-Contrib…
TL;DR - I’m going to walk through how I rebuilt this blog using a static site generator. In the first half I walk through my decision for moving to a static site. You can skip down to the tech talk if you want. Read more about Hacking up sites with Middleman…
In my previous blog post I linked to a demo application hosted on Heroku. Heroku is great, as you can use their free hosting to quickly get your demo up online using a variety of technologies. Unfortunately I ran into a few issues related to traffic spikes and bad weather. The cloud is great, until it’s not. Read more about Heroku and your demo: It's great till it isn't…
I’m currently working with the amazing folks at Arc90 on a pretty hefty project. It’s a great working environment that really stresses collaboration and learning, with weekly code and design reviews. We’re starting to use Backbone.js on a number of projects, so a quick talk was organized to explain the ins and outs to everyone. Since I had worked on some previous projects using Backbone, they asked me to do an intro. Read more about Backbone.js and You…
If you’re using nginx as your webserver and need to pass URL parameters to your PHP front controller then some adjustments to your configuration file are necessary: Read more about Protip: URL Parameters with Nginx & PHP…
A while back on Hacker News, a.k.a Ed Weissman posted his collection of tips and advice for programmers. It was amazing stuff. Read more about For Programmers: The Best of edw519…
I’m a command line interface kind of guy, which is funny since I do everything on Macs. Then again, I first embraced PCs with an Apple IIe, which was a CLI only experience.
One little tool I’ve had installed for a while is z by Rupa. It’s a nice little shell script that keeps tabs on the directories you’ve been cding in and out of and then lets you quickjump to them using a simple regex. So instead of remembering a long path like: Read more about My little friend z…
My fellow worker bees over at Gabardine.com decided to flex their design chops by lending a hand to the folks downtown at Liberty Square. While Occupy Wall Street gives us a much needed civics lesson, and the 1% continues to skim the cream off your bank accounts, Scott Grant took some of the DIY signs from the occupation and re-made them as snappy posters. Read more about Occupy Wall Street - Design Edition…
A friend of mine emailed me the other day with a quick question: “What’s an easy way to convert an entire site to PDF? Are there tools for this?”
Why yes, yes there are. In fact, it’s pretty easy to do if you’re on a Mac or Linux OS using wget and wkhtmltopdf: Read more about How to: Convert site to PDF with wkhtmltopdf and wget…
Phrap is a super-light PHP database wrapper using PDO for basic CRUD operations with MySQL. If that doesn’t sound sexy, well, that’s because it isn’t. Read more about Introducing Phrap…
I spent a very frustrating hour this morning trying to get the JSON gem to work on Ruby 1.9.2 p136 installed via RVM on Snow Leopard. I thought I would post my solution to help any other unfortunate souls. Read more about Compile Ruby 1.9.2 with RVM using Homebrew installed Iconv…
Silly me. I stumbled across a question on Stack Overflow that was right up my alley, as it was something I had worked on before: Extract Relevant Tag/Keywords from Text block. The question posted by user593778 indicated that they wanted to use PHP or JavaScript to lift relevant keywords from a block of text. Read more about I got gamed on Stack Overflow…
I always figure one of the best ways to learn a new language is to try out a couple of Project Euler exercises using it. I had solved this one with JavaScript previously, but using CoffeeScript let me use some more Python-style comprehensions to get to the same solution: Read more about Project Euler #3 in CoffeeScript…
I’m currently working on a large print project. It’s a membership directory for a non-profit organization and I’m laying it out with Adobe InDesign. The client handed me a CSV dump of their member database for the directory. I’ve mentioned more times than I can count how much I dislike repetition (cutting, pasting, rinse, repeat) so I cooked up some Ruby scripts to parse the CSV into various XML and plaintext formats. Read more about Bending CSVs to your will with Ruby…
