Logical Solver: Turn facts into conclusionsI’ve been playing through Dishonored 2 and last night I came across the Jindosh Lock Puzzle. It’s straight forward enough. There are five family November 7, 2019 analysis

Programming with jqSo jq is awesome. When you need to process JSON then jq is your factory line transforming the raw JSON ingredients into delicious ice cream November 6, 2019 command line programming

Command line tools - jqNeed to parse some JSON data? Of course you do! JSON is practically the lifeblood of API calls these days. GitHub Google Cloud Storage Lots of November 5, 2019 command line

Friday Lunch Links — #1Hello! Here’s a collection of interesting links I’ve found in the last week. Enjoy! The Little Handbook of Statistical Practice by Gerard E. Dallal, November 1, 2019 links

Why diversity mattersLack of diversity in tech is no accident. Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, returned to his alma mater Stanford in 2012 to teach his now famous October 30, 2019 career

Music for coding - October 2019Like working to music? I do! Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately. Pinout (Original Soundtrack) [feat. Susanna Lundgren] by Douglas Holmquist October 28, 2019 music

Code puzzles are a poor way to gauge technical candidatesThe tech industry is a long way from having a common good interview process. There are many problems, but today I’m going to write about one in October 24, 2019 career

Add vim to a pipeline with vipeHave you ever wanted to stop and edit text in the middle of a pipeline? With vipe you can! Take the output of brew search as an example. What we if January 18, 2019 command line

Connecting Objects with ObservableToday let’s dive a bit into the Observable module from Ruby’s standard library. Let’s say we’re launching a rocket. Fortunately we have a very high December 5, 2018 ruby

Let’s write a shell scriptNow that you have a $PATH let’s start using it! Today we’ll write a simple shell script in your personal bin directory. Let’s start by picking the September 6, 2016 command line

What’s a $PATH anyway?You’ve probably seen $PATH or just PATH before as the place you need to add new commands for your prompt. What is that? Where is it? How does it August 30, 2016 command line

Let’s Use Hwacha to Scan URLsI’ve written a gem, Hwacha, as a wrapper around Typhoeus to allow for quick and easy response checking for multiple URLs. Let’s go through some December 18, 2013 ruby

Deliberate GitHello Internet! Here’s my talk “Deliberate Git” in blog post form. There’s also video of my presentation of Deliberate Git at Steel City Ruby 2013. June 19, 2013 git

Customize Your IRBYou probably spend a lot of time in IRB (or the Rails console) but have you taken the time to customize it? Today we’ll take a look at the things March 19, 2013 ruby

Program Like a VideogamerI see a lot of you out there worried about the next step in your programming career. Or even worried about the next step when learning a new February 6, 2013 programming

Gem Spotlight: interactive_editorToday we’ll take a quick look at one of my favorite gems: interactive_editor. Have you ever been in a REPL session (rails console, irb, pry, etc.) January 4, 2013 ruby

Things Most Interviewees Fail to DiscoverIt’s a great time to be a Rails developer. Companies left and right are turning to Rails or using it already for efficient web development. If you August 17, 2012 career

Rails isn’t for beginnersThere’s been some talk online about how Rails is losing its focus on beginners or that it’s getting too complex for its own good. I have a different April 3, 2012 rails

How to use bundler instead of rvm gemsetsListening to the latest Ruby Rogues I was intrigued to hear André Arko describe how using bundler can completely obviate using rvm gemsets. He said March 19, 2012 ruby

How to write (and test) a gem to serve static files on the Rails asset pipelineToday we write (and test!) a gem that simply adds new static assets to a Rails project. I puzzled out most of this while working on my March 15, 2012 ruby rails

A Taste of MetaprogrammingToday we take a small taste from the wide ranging metaprogramming abilities that Ruby gives us. We’ll be looking at define_method and method_missing March 1, 2012 ruby

Fun with Rock, Paper, ScissorsJames Edward Gray II’s Ruby Quiz #16 was to implement Rock, Paper, Scissors playing classes to compete on a playing field managed by a given Game February 28, 2012 ruby

Let’s Write a Gem: Part 2Continued from Let’s Write a Gem, Part 1 In this post we’ll finish our tutorial gem. Along the way I’ll point out some confusing pitfalls you can February 23, 2012 ruby

Let’s Write a Gem: Part 1Gems. Gotta love em. If you’re a Ruby developer then you already know that gems are simply fundamental to Ruby programming. Let’s write one. Right February 21, 2012 ruby

Increase Rails Performance with Database IndexesEver added a belongs_to or has_many to a model in Rails? Did you remember to add the database index? Find out why you should and how it’s done in February 16, 2012 rails

Parsing Dates and Times from Strings using strptimeHowdy ya’ll. As much as we’d prefer to just deal with nicely formatted data; the real world sometimes requires that we parse weird datetime strings February 9, 2012 ruby

Anonymous blocks as function arguments in RubyA quick tidbit that comes in handy when you want to write some idiomatic Ruby: how to write methods that accept optional blocks of code to execute. February 8, 2012 ruby