An (unscientific) study in behavior change with software
Forming habits is hard. There’s been tons of research on what practices help form new habits successfully. And there has been research on what software can do to help form new habits. It’s not enough to simply send daily reminders or keep track of the goals in a visible place....
In the year 2100
Recently I was asked by a coworker to write up some ideas for where our company would be in the future. Not just next year, or in 5 years, but where we saw the company in the year 2100. For my other coworkers, the year 2100 probably represents far enough...
Indent and colorize HTML strings in pry
(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on Coderwall on November 14, 2013.) An issue I run into frequently while testing with tools like capybara by dropping into pry is that the last response for a page...
Apprentice Talk Video & Notes
Back in September, I had a blast speaking at Nickel City Ruby. My talk was entitled “Apprenticeship: Software Craftsmanship’s Missing Link” and included a lot of slides of sasquatches. The video has been posted to Confreaks, so I’m embedding it here. Also note that I have posted my notes...
git fml
(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on Coderwall on September 3, 2013.) For when you need to go back to a clean slate and declare FML, add this to your ~/.gitconfig: [alias] fml = !"git fetch...
A simple text editor foot pedal
When I first starting talking about building a chording keyboard, both in person and online, people began to ask me about the possibility of building a computer foot pedal. With the Teensy microcontroller, a foot pedal would only need to watch a single digital input and output a few...
Building a chording keyboard: progress so far
Chording keyboards have been a computing peripheral for a long time. They’ve been in use at least since Douglas Engelbart gave what is known as The Mother of all Demos in 1968. Rather than try to sum up the history and potential of the device here, I recommend you...
Minsky's Circle Algorithm in Shoes.rb / Hackety Hack
(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on Coderwall on July 27, 2013.) I wanted to try to implement Minsky’s Circle Algorithm from the famous HAKMEM. As noted in lots of other places online (1, 2, 3), the algorithm...
WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version x.x.x
(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on Coderwall on May 23, 2013.) When you run tests or rake, if you see: WARNING: Nokogiri was built against LibXML version 2.9.0, but has dynamically loaded 2.7.8 Then do the...
Reset a lost password on an Ubuntu VM
(This post is part of my blog archiving project. This post appeared on Coderwall on April 24, 2013.) You may be like me and keep a couple virtual machines around on your laptop for development, testing, and gaming. I had an Ubuntu VM in VMWare that I’d lost...