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?

January 1, 2016

My Annual Review 2015

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2015.

November 3, 2015

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.

September 11, 2015

Ceramic Nation

Project announcement! Last night I built a Markov Chain-generated novel, titled Ceramic Nation.

February 22, 2015

The N + 1 Problem

Recently, I was thinking about the N + 1 problem. N + 1 is a performance issue in a web application, where a method call unleashes a torrent of database queries.

January 21, 2015

Learning to Program as a Career Change

A few years ago, I wrote my first computer program. Today, I am a full-time programmer. In this post, I’ll list the resources and ideas that helped me get started.

October 31, 2014

Ruby Symbol#to_proc

What does &: mean in Ruby? In this post, I’ll explain.

August 27, 2014

Code Club: Rack and Rails Server

This week in Code Club we explored Rack, the middleware of the Rails stack. Rack is newsworthy of late due to a change in ownership, prompting inevitable questions about the future. As Rails developers, we wanted to know what Rack really does.

August 20, 2014

Vim or Bust

Starting with this blog post, I will be using Vim as my primary text editor.

March 31, 2014

The Case for One Computer Monitor

I have one computer monitor on my desk. Not long ago, this was common, but today, many people have two, three, or four monitors. In this post, I’d like to make the case that most professional programmers can use just one monitor.