What Code Craves

Week of Insomnia

2008-08-17

Contrary to what you might think, I think insomnia's fantastic. It puts me in this limbo state where my mind feels like lead and I suck at almost everything. One thing I've found myself to be quite good at is catching up on Internet. There was plenty of crap, but I found a lot of good technical stuff.

Mini-apps Galore!

2008-08-13

I'm warming up to the idea of using small webapps that do less. Instead of full blown behemoth applications that take a lot of time to learn and configure, they're more in the spirit of Unix tools or perl one-liners. Here's three that I came across that show quite a bit of promise.

Picking at Capistrano

2008-08-12

Here is the setup I wanted with Capistrano with my housing app. I wanted to develop locally and continue using Subversion over SSH for source control. Meanwhile, Cap would run svn commands remotely with basic svnserve. My first configuration looked like this:

Tweaking Apache with Phusion Passenger

2008-08-11

Carrying over from weekend cleanup, I started exploring the different deployment options available. Here are some bleak notes as I go along:

Debian/Ubuntu Specific Rails with Postgresql

2008-08-10

I spent the weekend migrating from my shared hosting at Dreamhost over to VPS hosting at SilverRack. In the move, I setup my housing app to run on postgresql instead of mysql. I was in for a few surprises though.

Messy Ruby Requires

2008-08-07

At some point in tinkering with a language, you outgrow simple scripts and want to organize your code into separate modules that live in separate files. It's just this little OCD code habit you develop. Since I've only been using Ruby with Rails up till now, loading and importing the correct library files have been completely hidden away by Rails convention and magic. Everytime I want to use a library named 'acts_as_giraffe', I either A) assumed it was loaded already, or B) do require 'actsasgiraffe'. But the real world's not so easy.

Flaco Crushers

2008-08-06

Originally, this post was titled 'Ruby Markdown Implementations' and I was going to talk about alternatives to BlueCloth. But while I was reading up about Maruku, I followed a link to webgen. As if that wasn't enough, reading up on webgen led me to yet another static site generator called webby.

Flaco Rewrite

2008-08-05

I've been happily using my own ghetto blog I named Flaco Blog. The beauty of forcing myself to eat my own software is that I can't really complain about it. Either something works exactly as I want it, or it slowly irritates me until it overcomes the effort needed to rewrite it. So why am I proposing a rewrite?

My Keyboard

2008-08-03

... is awesome. I have the same keyboard at home and at work. It does everything that I want a keyboard to do. It looks fantastic. It feels fantastic. It types fantastic. And best of all, it does all of this without any drama.

Emacs Info

2008-08-02

Just a quick cheatsheet of how to get around in Info mode in Emacs.

Rails String Inflections

2008-07-30

I've been using constantize to turn strings into Class objects. Constantize is mixed into the String class by Rails. This got me to thinking about other clever helpers that might be mixed into the string class. A quick search through the API did not disappoint.

RSpec'ing acts_as_state_machine

2008-07-24

One of my favorite plugins I've seen so far is acts_as_state_machine. It's a dead simple way to model the different states your models can be in. It also lets you register callbacks to when a model enters, entered, or leaves a particular state. It's absolutely fantasic until I have to test it. Then it becomes an absolute nightmare.

First Sprint

2008-07-18

Today at work, I sat in my first planning poker meeting. This was in preparation of our next 4 weeks of development time. We used the Planning Poker site to vote on suggested projects. I had read a little bit about user stories back in my Rails class, but the few times I tried practicing agile development methodologies were always met with whining and criticism. It's good to be at a place where people support this.

Dangerous Scaffolding

2008-07-15

I did something bad today. It wasn't bad enough to destroy working customer instances, but it was enough to make all the dev team all up in a huff. The worst part of the whole experience was a) I didn't remember I was the one who nuked it, and b) it got nuked because of some crufty scaffolding and default behaviours.

Capify my App

2008-07-13

After a complete Saturday of vegging out, I decided to accomplish something today. My initial target was to pull Craigslist rental listings for my housing app, but that led to me learning more about plugins, which somehow led me to reading about Capistrano. Yak shave, anyone?

Fuck Fixtures

2008-07-09

When you first start testing a newly created application, fixtures might seem very appealing. They're easy to write, they make sense, and they quickly create valid or invalid instances for you to test with. Unfortunately, fixtures don't scale with a growing project. They quickly get out of hand, and you'll end up spending more time fixing your fixtures than your tests and code. So fuck you fixtures, and good riddance.

Rails Webapp Engineering

2008-07-04

The day after I came back from Australia, I started my new job at Coupa Software. I'm absolutely loving it at the moment because of the awesome people and the amount of software I'm learning. Here's just a few that I've picked up in my first week that I'd like to jot down.

Platform of Choice

2008-06-28

I kept some rants and notes to myself a while back about what I thought about some of the operating systems I've used and currently use. These notes are more about day-to-day usage from the perspective of a software developer / power user rather than an objective review of each platform. I also update these pages with links to my favorite apps and tricks I've come across.

Fuzz Testing and Being a Dick

2008-06-11

I really couldn't help myself with this one. Someone gave me the privledge to play around with their pet project, and the first thing I thought of was to read the HTML, and write a bash loop to spew all over it. We both got a kick out of it.

my $perl;

2008-05-20

My first exposure to Perl was near the end of high school when I was working as a computer assistant at the USDA Forest Service. I really can't recall the exact gut feeling Perl gave me at the time, but I imagine it was a mixture of disgust and delight. A few years later, near the end of my undergrad career, Perl came back into my life. Only instead of a few simplistic scripts, Perl was now the core language for my job.

Kernel Designs

2008-05-03

I really enjoyed my introductory operating systems class at Berkeley. The class focused on classic high level OS concepts like process models, virtual memory, concurrency, and more. To go along with the material, teams of 4 formed to implement components in a toy OS called Nachos. The purpose of this was to keep students focused on the concepts rather than wade through the quagmire that is x86 assembly.

Emacs Tips

2008-04-22

Earlier, I wrote a quick into of how to customize your emacs, but then I realized that I had no running list of cool emacs tricks. This article sets out to remedy that with a list of my favorite commands. It's by no means complete, so I'll keep adding on to when when I learn more stuff. The Gnu Emacs Manual is a good reference to flip through from time to time to learn new tricks.

Rails Tips

2008-03-12

I have started, abandoned, and restarted many pet rails projects. All hype aside, I've collected a fair amount of rails idioms. Whenever I come across a problem I know I've dealt with in the past, I usually run a few greps through my past projects to look for an answer. The following pages are disorganized tips of things I have done that are useful.

Premature Software Testing

2008-03-10

I've fallen victim to it a few times now and would like to remind myself of the causes and consequences. Don't get me wrong, I love testing and have attempted/done/failed at it ever since CS61B. I've used standardized test frameworks, hackish quickie frameworks from school, and created my own small frameworks for specific projects. Testing is a good thing.

Customizing Emacs

2008-02-14

My editor of choice is eight megs and constantly swapping. I didn't meticulously choose my editor, but rather had one forced upon me freshman year in CS61A. Being young and impressionable at the time, I saw no downsides to the editor and kept using it more and more day after day. First it was coding, then notes, then email. Now four years later, I'm basically married to my editor, for better or for worse. For a complete reference of my .emacs file, see this link.

Setup Rails with Postgresql

2008-02-05

Everytime I set up a Rails project, there are many braindead steps that need to be followed. Instead of doing a web search each time I need to get an app setup, I follow these simple sequence of instructions.

CSS Tips and Tricks

2008-02-05

These aren't organized in any way for now. Maybe when I collect enough of them, I'll create a cookbook of some kind.

Infuriating Job Applications

2008-01-31

Spring is in the air, but instead of allergies, I'm seeing my peers being hit hard by job anxieties. Thanks to this gloomy weather, I've been on top of my job applications. That isn't to say that every day has been a merry job hunt. Normally I would've just let the small things slide, but it's time to be more frank. When companies come to a career fair, they have just as much at stake as the people they're hiring. What surprises me is how oblivious certain companies are to how they're damaging their own reputation. Here's a rundown of what can use improvement.

Flaco Blog

2008-01-27

A while back I was chatting to Arthur and bitching about all the various blog systems. To date, I've tried a wide cross section of them and found them all to be inadequate. Arthur's proposed solution was to write his own. I shied away from that notion until a few days ago. Then I finally caved and started thinking about doing my own.

Shoot em up Debugging

2008-01-26

Debugging is like a video game. Unfortunately, it's the meanest video game you will ever play. The objective is to destroy bugs, but each destroyed bug will only reveal more sinister bugs with more health, greater mana, and better AI. After you've smooshed all the trivial syntax buggers, a whole new species evolves and leaves you fighting a being as intelligent as yourself. That fleeting sense of accomplishment that you felt the first time you vanquished a missing semicolon quickly melts into a never-ending nightmare of software maintenance.