A blog by Erty Seidohl

  • Keeping track of your competency as a programmer

    Especially for Hacker School students, but really for anyone: If you’re looking for a way to discretely measure your progress through Hacker School, check out the following resources: Programmer Competency Matrix This one especially is a good way to measure yourself. Programmer Competency Matrix rebooted, which is the same thing but extended. Signs you’re a…

  • HS Day 18: Debugging and Poker

    Spent a while on the phone with Time Warner Cable last night before going to bed. Since rent here is under what I had budgeted, but the apartment doesn’t have internet (I’ve been using my phone), so tomorrow between 2-4, I’m getting 15MBps internet installed. Still well within my budget, and now I can play…

  • HS Day 18: Collision Detection

    Woke up this morning around 10:30, which is of course when I’m supposed to be at Hacker School. Emailed Nick to tell him that I was going to be late, and started heading into the city. The R seems to be running express these days, so the trip was a lot shorter than usual. I think…

  • HS Day 16 & 17: StarCraft

    By combining two days into one post, I’ll be able to catch up to today and be back on schedule for blogging! I mentioned in my last post that I fell asleep without setting an alarm (on purpose). It was very nice to sleep in, and I woke up around 1 of my own volition.…

  • HS Day 15: The Postal Service

    Today started out okay but ended up excellent. I intended to go to a tech talk in DUMBO, which is in north Brooklyn, but ended up sleeping through my alarm. I was supposed to be at Hacker School at noon to run a D&D campaign, but missed my stop on the subway and ended up…

  • HS Day 14: Thursday

    I’m writing this on Friday, because somehow I managed to not blog yesterday! This will be a short post so I can get on to Friday. Took the R into Manhattan in the morning and arrived at Hacker School right about on time. Gave a presentation on MySQL and relational databases to a group of interested people…

  • Integers and Strings in JavaScript

    Joe and I just spent an hour or so debugging my Node.js application, a simple multiplayer tag game. The problem was that while a player was moving, they disappeared from every other player’s view. Not the greatest for playability. So we dove in to the code, and figured out that on each loop, the x…

  • Blaggregator/WordPress: Aggregating only certain posts

    For users of Blaggregator: If you use wordpress for your blog, you can get a custom feed of only posts which match a tag by constructing the following URL: http://example.com/?tag=tagname&feed=rss2 So for example, I’m going to tag all of the posts that I want on Blaggregator with “blaggregator” and then give Blaggregator the feed url…

  • HS Day 13: Two Weird Things and One Fun Thing

    So I forgot to mention – there’s a very small window in the kitchen that I opened last night to let some air get through the apartment. Across the way, there’s a window that opens into another apartment – they are about 3 feet apart. Apparently, the tenant who lives there likes to lean out…

  • HS Day 12: Moved In

    Not a particularly difficult day today. Woke up around 9am with the intention of being on the bus by 9:45. Showered, dressed, and made my way out the door a little ahead of schedule. The bus stop that I have to walk to is just about two blocks from the apartment, and there are a…