How and Why to Squash Your Pull Request

Many pull requests go through a cycle: programmer opens pull request, maintainer gives feedback, programmer makes changes, repeat until ready to merge, maintainer merges. Prior to the merge, the pull request can be messy, full of reverts, fixups, and WIP commits. In the end, those commits are noise. We can tell a better story by squashing the branch. ...

July 3, 2016

Recreating Elixir's Enum.sum

I’m learning Elixir, and today as an exercise, I was challenged to recreate Enum.sum using recursion. Here’s my solution. ...

June 30, 2016

Server Side Sorting in Ruby

Recently a friend asked me this question about server-side sorting in Rails. Here’s the question and my answer. ...

June 28, 2016

Keyword, Match, and Region in VimScript

After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between keyword, match, and region following syn in a Vim syntax highlighting file. Here’s my answer. ...

April 20, 2016

From One End to the Other in Ruby

A while back I tackled the following programming challenge: From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that ends in a six such that if that six is removed and placed in front of the remaining digits of the number, the resulting number will be four times as large as the original. ...

March 6, 2016

LED Clock in Ruby

A few weeks ago I built a program to display an LED clock. Here’s the problem, and my solution. ...

March 6, 2016

Round Robin Problem in Lua

A while ago, I solved the round robin following programming challenge in Lua. Here’s the problem, and my solution. ...

March 6, 2016

Vim Buffer Problem

A few weeks back I tackled the following programming challenge from my colleague Josh Branchaud: Vim Buffer I open up a new Vim buffer and type all the numbers 1 to 10,000, separated by spaces. Then, my cat walks on the keyboard and somehow activates a substitution command that replaces all the ‘0’ digits (zeros) with spaces. If I now sum up all the numbers in the buffer, as delineated by spaces, what is the total? ...

March 6, 2016

My Annual Review 2015

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2015. ...

January 1, 2016

Reflecting on Three Years of Programming

This month marks three years since I started programming; I’d like to take a minute and reflect on this milestone. ...

November 3, 2015