Programming

USING PDM: THE PYTHON DEPENDENCY MANAGER

Since it looks as if Twitter's days are numbered, I've been looking at what it would take to move most of my on-line presence into my personal blog space and off of the various sites where I make various comments and such. One thing I haven't been doing well is backing up this site right here; my last backup was over two years ago. That's... not good.

Programming

CODE ARCHEOLOGY: THE UNIX LOCATE PROGRAM, 1994, AND THE SQUOZEN DATABASE FORMAT

I've been conducting a bit of code archaeology, and this week I've been researching the original Locate program, the one written in 1983 and which persisted until the release of FreeBSD in 1994, at least. In this post, I'm going to describe the original Locate database format, which was called Squozen 1.0 Here's what I've learned.

Review

REVIEW: THE PROGRAMMER'S BRAIN, BY FELIENNE HERMAN

During my recovery from shoulder surgery I read through Felienne Herman's The Programmer's Brain. I have mostly good things to say about it, although there are also a number of issues with the early parts of the book that are, shall we say, stuck in a mindset with which I disagree.

So let's talk about the later parts first.

Project

PROJECT RETROSPECTIVE: STORYSITE 2022

I have a number of "static" microsites, in the sense that they're just plain old HTML with a minimum of Javascript supporting their operations. The oldest one is the Journal Entries site, which has been a Markdown archive of my vast and adult space opera since 1995 or so... which is quite a long time! It's had a number of generations since then; the first version had a simple perl-to-html converter, the output of which I would hand-edit, along with the index page. Recently, I got it into my head to revise them, and the change has amazing.

Zola

USING ZOLA SHORTCODES & MACROS FOR NESTED LISTS

Zola is a static site generator that I've been using for my story sites and a couple of other documentation sites. It specializes in converting trees of markdown into stylish websites through a template library. As I've been getting better at, I've really started to enjoy it. Since my scattershot brain depends on lists and lookups, I have a lot of "definition files" that are nothing but a syntax example and some explanation of what it means. I'd like to be able to organize those sensibly, and Zola's shortcodes let me do that.

Career

THE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES YOU SHOULD KNOW, 2020 EDITION

Everyone has their ideal list of "best languages" you should be learning in 2020. I'm going to give you three lists, instead. Here are the programming languages you need to get the job.

Web development

PREVENTING DRAGGABILITY ON BOTH FIREFOX AND CHROME

Every image on a webpage is, unless you take measures to prevent it, draggable and droppable. Even on Linux, which isn't the world's most user-friendly operating system, you can pick any image on the page and drag it off, drop it onto your file manager of choice (Caja, Nautilus, KFM), and you'll be prompted for a filename under which it should be saved.

Sometimes you have complex forms that people click through very quickly. Your controls include card interfaces with a picture and a checkbox or radio button, and sometimes a sloppy click on one of those won't register as a click because it'll register as a drag on the photo instead, annoying the customer. Here's how to prevent that:

Professionalism

AGILE IS DESIGNED TO CAUSE BURNOUT

In software development, Agile is the most popular form of project organization and Jira by Atlassian is the most common tool used to keep track of that organization. But two different ideas from two very different places and times have convinced me that Agile is the primary cause of developer burnout.

Professionalism

YOU'RE NOT MISSING ANYTHING BY NOT WORKING AT A FAANG.

I make it a habit to never respond directly on The Orange Site, but a recent post there caught my attention and I wanted to respond to the poor guy. He said that he was on his third startup since getting out of university, but he'd never worked at "a big company" and feared that he'd somehow made it to 30 (OMG!) without ever learning "the right way to do something."

There is no right way.

Programming

TYPESCRIPT OR BE DAMNED

I recently had a chance to finish up a major refactor of the codebase for BFDLang (Bureaucratic Form Design Language), a hefty (and now Turing-complete) language for describing, well, bureacratic forms to web documents. I work at an insurance company, and BFDLang gives the administrative staff the power to describe a form in a spreadsheet and immediately see what it would look like as a web document; it's a powerful, in-house no-code solution for them backed by a ton of code, mostly written by myself and two junior developers. The refactor was huge, and complicated, and I couldn't have done it with JavaScript. TypeScript saved me weeks of work.

User-hostile software

APPLE IS A CREEP

Psychologists know what makes someone a creep. A "creep" is a person who makes you feel uncomfortable or vaguely threatened, but who you are obliged to be near for professional or social reasons. You don't like being around him or her, but you can't leave the room because your professional or social situation require that you be there.

By this definition, Apple is a creep.

Programming

STILL GOT IT

Yesterday, after a long day of my day job, in which I spend all of my time either hacking in Typescript and React or doing a lot of dev-ops, I decided that I was finally gonna sit down and write a little Rust. I picked a project off my stack: "Rewrite the Unix locate program in Rust." The last time I had tried this, my brain didn't work at all.

Web development

HTML TEMPLATES: NOT A NEW IDEA, DEFINITELY FASTER THAN ROLLING YOUR OWN

About fifteen years ago at a startup, I built a very data-heavy single page app for biologists to manage a map/reduce version of a gene sequencing engine, and because it was data heavy, it made use of templates to render much of the HTML. If you've ever been in this situation, you reach for a library.

With HTML Templates, you might not need a library. But I suspect you're going to want one.

Programming

YOUR COMPANY NEEDS ONLY FIVE PROGRAMMING LANGUAGES, NO MORE, NO LESS

If you've worked in this business for a long time, you've definitely encountered that mid-size company where every team has their own favorite language. And while this might work for awhile, it's a long-term disaster waiting to happen within your company. Eventually, every company that grows to a certain size and survives realizes that you need to clamp down and have at most four computer languages allowed inside your build process.

Here are the four languages:

Personal

MY PROCESS: NEVER USE PIDGIN IN TO-DOS.

Like most people, you probably write your to-dos in a shorthand way. I do, and most people do it as well. You know, this sort of thing, a one-day list I made for my latest project (which, ironically, includes a To-Do list manager). And along the way, I've discovered that I should never used shorthand or pidgin in my to-dos.

Full stack

WHAT 'FULL STACK' MEANS TO ME

Chris Coyier has an article called The Widening Responsibility of Front-End Developers and what I find most interesting about the article is how it skates over one of the most critical issue in web development since the release of Backbone.js: the emergence of data-driven websites. In the same way that a travel magazine, a cooking magazine, and a copy of the an annual farm report are different, so there are lots of different kinds of web development: the first is light and fluffy and needs no data; the second has some important data needs, especially if you allow for things like ingredient substitution, modifying serving counts, and nutritional information; the last is incredibly data-driven, being almost nothing but tables and charts.

Project

NOTESMACHINE: TWO CENTRAL OPERATIONS

As I've been working on my own little Zettelkasten engine, I've realized that there are exactly two operations that matter more than any other. The client will handle many of the details of showing notes and note collections (called "boxes", since Zettelkasten literally means "note box"), but the server needs to do exactly two things exactly right every time:

• ingest a note
• return a box when requested

Regular expressions

READING A PAPER: DERIVATIVES OF REGULAR EXPRESSIONS RE-EXAMINED

Reading paper in computer science is itself an important skill, one you should master. I've detailed some of my problems before in my series on A Play On Regular Expressions, and now that I have a little free time on my hand I'm going to dive into some of the issues that I want to cover in the future.

A MOMENT OF JOB SEARCH MELANCHOLY

I'm finishing my third week of looking for work, following the COVID 19-related layoffs at BigFish Games, and I'm coming to a very depressing conclusion: there aren't that many interesting new worlds to conquer.

THE TRANSFORMATION PRIORITY PREMISE AND FUNCTIONAL LANGUAGES

I know I've commented before on how, while Clean Code has its place, there are adherents who adhere to it so literally and unthinkingly that they've constrained their careers and condemned themselves to the same silos for the rest of their professional lives.