Programming - Bactroid.net

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Programming

In which I remember that I'm an application developer and analyst.

Monoids as a Way To Keep Code DRY

We have a maxim in programming circles: Don’t repeat yourself, commonly abbreviated as “DRY.” It’s not uncommon to see a comment on your PR asking you pull something out into a repeatable function in order to “keep your code DRY.” function getFileContents(system) { return readFilePromise('logs/' + system

On Composition as the Guiding Principle of Functional Programming

One of the most important concepts in functional programming is composition. If you’ve ever used Unix command line activities to pipe commands together, you have used a form of composition.

What I Like About Haskell: Data Structures As Control Flow

What I Like About Haskell: Data Structures As Control Flow

When you first encounter Haskell-inspired structures like Maybe, Either, or Reader, they might seem needlessly complicated. I myself was guilty of thinking that these abstractions only served to obfuscate control flow that would be much more apparent and readable using if/else, try/catch or even ternary operators. Now, I

The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege

The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege

During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional detachment, and, namely, a single-mindedness about their work to the point at which “they devoted every waking hour to it,

A Balm For Gaslighting Myself

I know it's a stupid and rather meaningless indicator, but when I have moments where I doubt that I'm a “real” developer, my GitHub activity chart helps reassure me that I'm a real developer. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck…

Effectful Haskell: Reader, Transformers, Typeclasses

Here we’ll be looking at Reader, starting with a common use case – accessing application configuration – and working our way to effectful bliss, starting from first principles. Once we’re there, we’ll examine how we can add other types to our context, like IO and other monads, using monad

Time After Capitalism

Time After Capitalism

A large part of what makes hobbies enjoyable is that, freed from the profit motive, practitioners work at the pace they choose, allowing them to experiment, mess up, quit, and start over. My coworkers make fun of me in a good-natured way because, on many days, I get done working

How Haskell Changes the Way You Think

Reading the Haskell book leads to weird tangential insights. For example, in some instances, it might be better to add negative numbers in your app rather than subtracting positive ones because addition is commutative and subtraction isn't. If your computation had to be split across multiple boxen or cores, those

Nerdy Girls Need Love Too

I'm home sick today, and I've been alternating between sleeping and learning about functors. I think I might be a nerd, you guys. (Side note: I highly recommend Learn You A Haskell For Great Good if you want to either learn more about Haskell or go deeper with functional programming

Your App Will Eventually Be a Legacy App

I just spent an hour debugging a problem with an aging legacy system for my job and other thirty minutes fixing the problem and cleaning up the mess after all that debugging. A MySQL mediumint auto_increment key had overflowed on a very central and very important table, leading to

The Full Fruits of Our Labor

Be warned that what follows is undoubtedly socialist. This makes sense because these days I identify unabashedly as a libertarian socialist / anarcho-communist. Feel free to grasp your pearls, fall back on your fainting couch, and watch some Sean Hannity instead of reading further if you feel so inclined. When USians

Why Deadlines Need to Drop Dead

Implement continuous delivery, and when somebody asks you when your product will ship, you can tell them, “we shipped this morning. We’re shipping again tomorrow. When will we ship a specific feature?” You know the answer to that one, right? “When it’s done.” Why Deadlines Need to Drop

Assuming Control

I just wasted fifteen minutes because I typed enrollment.course_id instead of enrollment['course_id']. I think Python and Javascript are fighting for control of my brain. #JustDeveloperThings

When the Lone Wolf Finds a Pack

Just had an amazing conversation with co-workers about how our first languages/platforms inform our coding style. Some of us are likely to tweak an SQL query until we get just the data we need. Others cast a wide net and narrow in language. My major takeaway from this conversation

An Open Letter to the cx_Oracle Module

Dear cx_Oracle module for Python, If you didn't want me calling your fetchall method, maybe you shouldn't have one. <3 Kate

Religion/Spirituality

Destiny

Sometimes I feel like the universe gently corrects my path to get me where I need to be. When I talk about these sorts of things, I sound an awful lot like the mystic I am, but keep in mind that I'm not necessarily talking about a fixed and unchangeable

The Marriage of Microsoft and Linux

What a strange world we live in. What's changed for Microsoft and open source in recent years is Microsoft has refocused on solving both its own and customers' business problems. That means, first, Linux is treated as an equal to Windows. "Microsoft actually uses a lot of Linux in-house.

The Joys of Qbasic

I finally got around to storing all of my documents in Dropbox, and that includes a Programming folder in which I have chucked nearly everything I've ever written since middle school. I have killed an hour this afternoon looking at all my old QBasic programs from high school. For example,

It Just Works

As someone who got into Linux, FreeBSD, and open source software back in 2000, I'm still adjusting to this brave new world where I can install a Linux distribution and all of my hardware just works without tinkering. #BackInMyDay #VideoDriversWereTheWorst #GetOffMyLawn

Chems

"'Relax and heal,' they said. I'm just sitting around the house. My job just requires me to sit in front of a keyboard all day. I should use this time to learn a new tech skill." [Tries to learn how to code extensions for Gnome Shell, which

Larry Wall: 5 Programming Languages Everyone Should Know

Java is sort of the COBOL of the 21st century, I think.

Digital Sisyphus

Back when I was developing on servers I had root on, I spent most of my time actually making things. These days, I spend most of my time figuring out how to install libraries/modules without admin powers. #JustDeveloperThings

Flappy Bird in Super Mario World

When you understand how processors work and how to write assembly code, you can do some truly extraordinary things.

ISO 8601

You know you're working in the right office when you realize that both you and your boss dated your performance appraisal using ISO 8601 standard dates (YYYY-MM-DD).

Wisdom of the Ancients

Nothing makes you feel like a wizened crone quite like explaining to a twenty-something how GATA (the University of Florida's 3270 CICS system) works/worked. I explained the messaging system as "what we did before we could text or IM". On the other hand, the knowledge of how