A Tour of Go Exercises: Equivalent Binary Trees

Categories: Code

For a new high-performance web project I’m working on, I decided to learn a new “low-level” language. After looking at Julia, Rust, and Go, I decided that for several reasons I would go with… Go. To get familiar with the idiom I’ve been reading through the docs and going through the excellent A Tour of … Read More

Calculating the “interest” on technical debt.

Categories: Software Development

“Technical debt” is one of those terms that experienced developers throw around when people ask them to do something they don’t really want to do. To be fair, many times we don’t want to do something because experience has taught us that short-cuts taken today will cost us in the future. But how much will … Read More

Roll-your-own pub sub with NGINX and Nchan on Centos 8!

Categories: FOSS

Publish and subscribe (pub/sub) is a powerful pattern that every developer should know. And while cloud hosting is awesome, sometimes it’s nice to take a little finer-grained control over the software that’s hosting your application. While working on moggers.gg, the time finally came to add notifications to the stack. Since the back-end is nginx fronting … Read More

Adding field support to MS PowerPoint

Categories: Code, Useful Code

I’ve been working on a series of videos about an unpublished app of mine called FlipStream, and I wanted to easily insert some information about the current PowerPoint presentation on the first slide. Sadly, PowerPoint doesn’t have a generic field replacement function like Word does. So, either I type some stuff and have to remember … Read More

Manage your hosts file from the command line.

Categories: Code, Useful Code

When you’re a full-stack developer, you often find yourself mixing and matching destination hosts on your development system. Sometimes you need to run your development codebase against a test back-end server, sometimes you need to spoof the test back-end with your local code base. All of this switching back-and-forth can be tedious, so I wrote … Read More

Welcome Home

Categories: Fun Code

One of the very first “big” programs I wrote all by myself was a banner-printing program for my TRS-80. It was all in TRS-80 Basic and I wasted almost an entire carton of tractor-feed paper while I was writing it. It was terrible code, and I’m sure if I saw it today I would cringe, … Read More

Using Unicode Property Escapes

Categories: Useful Code

So, as part of my other post about writing a banner printer I ended up going down the rabbit hole of Unicode characters and combining marks. In the process, I found this wonderful blog post by Dmitri Pavlutin that explains the ins-and-outs of dealing with “complicated” text in JavaScript very well. But unfortunately it still … Read More