Some good friends of mine got married recently, and I helped out with the site for the wedding. One of the things that needed to be put up on the site was a poem. Now, just dropping the text of the poem into the page as-is would look weird; poems …
It’s almost like a rite of passage for a developer to write a monad tutorial.
Well, this isn’t a monad tutorial. This is simply an effort to put an end to some of the nonsense that leads to monad tutorials being written in the first place and all …
My git workflow for anything non-trivial is pretty straightforward, but a little different from what I’ve seen others describe. I’m almost certainly not the only person out there who uses this workflow, so I’m certainly not claiming any originality.
There seem to be two camps, both based …
It’s funny. When I started this, I didn’t think the first proper post here I’d make would be on Irish grammar. This assumes a certain basic knowledge of Irish, such as word order and basic vocabulary. Tweet at me with any feedback.
Like English, but unlike many …
One of the things I’ll be covering here will be languages.
I’m currently learning a number of languages, though I’m taking some more seriously than others. The ones I’m currently taking seriously, in order of importance, are:
I would actually like to be …
Can’t Hack is a blog. Those who know my might know that I already have a blog over at stereochro.me, but this is meant to be something a little different.
Over the years, I’ve began feeling somewhat burned out in general. There are so many things I …
Earlier this summer, I started brushing up on my French, and learning Spanish and Portuguese using Duolingo. More recently, I started learning some Dutch too for when I attend FOSDEM. Here are some resources I’m using to help me.
It’s long struck me as peculiar that package management isn’t more commonly built on top of union filesystems. I’m sure there’s probably somebody who’s had roughly similar ideas to the ones I’m about to put forward, but I’ve never came across them being …
I’ve been reviewing some SQL queries recently, and I’ve noticed some things that people do that lead to far from optimal performance. Here’s a few, and what people should be doing.
COUNT(*) vs. COUNT(col)At first blush, these may seem the same, but they actually mean …
One elementary error people make is using the type() function where isinstance() would be more appropriate1.
If you’re checking to see if an object has a certain type, you want isinstance() as it checks to see if the object passed in the first argument is of the type …
[Here’s something I knocked up for one of my co-workers who’s an experienced developer, but a Python neophyte. It may be useful to others.]
As in PHP, the global keyword in Python declares that any reference to a given variable name within the scope of a function or …
Ireland is a country of just over four million people, with a parliament consisting of 226 members in total, with 166 members in the the lower house and 60 in the upper, so for a nation of our size, we’ve a disproportionally high number of public representatives for a …
I did the minesweeper kata a few days back. It was a bit too easy, though it’s quite possible that this is more an artifact of how I approached it. Given that it’s a simple one, it might be an idea to see if I can take it …
I did the Harry Potter Kata earlier because I was feeling a little bored. Here’s the result. I use cents rather than euros as my unit of currency here.
I’d a start when I was thinking about how I’d solve the problem. I thought that being greedy …
Tim Bray posted up a good piece called ‘REST Questions‘, and one of the commentators asked several questions I felt I should respond to. This was my response with some light editing and additional links:
Mainly because there is still a little confusion on what exactly REST is?
REST is …
…or why it’s sometimes a good idea to just completely walk away.
I’ve been working on something here at work that really, really ought to have been done a good long time back. But between this and that, being pulled hither and thither, and having lots of other …
Years and years ago, I started work on a game I called “DroidWars”. It was based on some misunderstood third-hand information I got about Core Wars, and rather than having program battle each other directly, each of the programs controlled a robot in a 2D virtual world.
It was written …
At Blacknight, we use our own custom bugtracking software, GrassSnake. It’s something I wrote over the course of a few days on my own time and which I’ve been working on whenever I’ve had a free moment, which, in fairness, isn’t all that often.
It’s …
I’m writing a proof-of-concept server for a less jokey version of the SRGP. The protocol is more or less SRGP, but it doesn’t use MIME-style headers each request is made up of a series of netstrings. The header and body sections are terminated with empty netstrings, i …