Category: Technical
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Dictionaries and Word Lists for Programmers
I love to play with words, and I especially love to play with words programatically. I’ve written three small apps (so far) which use some form of a dictionary to create readable, humorous text: English to Shibe Translator Song Lyrics Twister Deity Generator I’ve had some people ask, so here are some great resources that…
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Project Idea: “Lanky” PHP Middleware Language
I keep not writing weekend web apps because I know that my projects generally follow this trajectory: 1. Build a database 2. Build some thin PHP middleware to expose an API to that database 3. Build a slick react/angular/whatever frontend 4. Realize a bunch of things I’m missing in my API and add them, lamenting the entire time…
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Should You Prefer Prefix over Postfix Increment?
I’ve been told in the past by a programming mentor that ++x is faster than x++, and I found myself refactoring a few increments in javascript the other day. But then I got thinking – is it really faster? Wouldn’t most modern compilers optimize out the difference? I decided to do some science. A Hacker…
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Making Tea With Javascript: OOP with the Prototype Chain
Javascript is weird. Prototypical inheritance is really powerful, but it’s quite a bit to wrap your mind around if you’re new to it. My first language was Java, and I’m comfortable with the “traditional” OOP paradigm. In this post, I’ll build a traditional Superclass/Subclass relationship in Javascript in an attempt to untangle the weirdness that is Javascript’s…
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SSD vs RAID0 for Gaming: SCIENCE!
A while ago, I bought an SSD (128GB Crucial M4) off Amazon, with the idea of putting it in my gaming rig as a “game cache”. My plan was to install my most played games on it, while the rest of my games sat on my current setup – Two 1TB Seagate Barracudas in RAID0.…
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One Letter at a Time
The other day, I saw the following brain-teaser posted on Reddit: along with the claim that “Startling” is the only 9 letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still have a word. Let’s see if that’s true using IPython and a long list of words from http://www.mieliestronk.com/wordlist.html [ed. note in 2018…
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The Broadcast Problem
In which I ramble on for a while before concluding nothing. You’ve been warned. Snapchat and Facebook Snapchat is quickly becoming my go-to communication tool for sharing moments with close friends. There’s a certain intimacy to it: just you and your chosen few recipients get to see the picture for a short while. It’s a way…
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Povio: On its way to cool
An open letter to the developers of Povio including some hopefully constructive and totally unsolicited feedback about the user experience. 1. Povio is cool I heard about Povio through Hacker News and immediately installed it. It’s new. It’s humble. It solves the problem of people sharing useless stuff about themselves. I can ping the people I’m…
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Terminal_’s Rules of Game Development: A retrospective
Terminal_ is a game that Evan Conway , Max Feldkamp, Mike Gold, Julian Delfino, and myself worked on during the winter of 2012-2013. I’ve since left the project, but I believe that Evan and Max are carrying it forward despite having day jobs. That winter, I had the role of Product Manager, and came up with the…
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What are Javascript, AJAX, jQuery, AngularJS, and Node.js?
This post is addressed toward people who have little to no experience with JavaScript, Node.js, or their associated libraries, but are interested in learning what they are and aren’t. Another student at Hacker School asked me to explain the difference between Javascript, AJAX, jQuery, AngularJS, and Node.js. Let’s start with the basics: JavaScript JavaScript is…