The best-laid plans are in my other pants
I came across an interesting question on Stack Overflow recently, and I found the process through which I developed my answer to be interesting on its own, so I’m going to document it here. If you are unfamiliar with Rust’s Send trait, I would suggest reading Send and Sync in the Rustonomicon. The bird’s-eye view…
JavaScript has become one of my favorite languages. This is no secret to those who know me in a professional capacity. It used to be one of my most hated languages until I spent some time with it, over a dozen years ago. When I have to use other languages, I almost always find myself…
There’s a myriad of npm modules for providing configuration to a node.js application or service, but I’ve always found them simultaneously over-engineered and lacking basic validation of the configuration document. I’ve settled on a pattern that works very well for my needs. It leverages the excellent Joi library for validation, and simple node built-ins for…
When working on some sort of data-driven project, I frequently have the need to allow deep-copying of data objects. There are several patterns that accomplish this, but I’ve settled on one in particular. Most .NET developers are probably familiar with the ICloneable interface. While this is a good starting point, it is not what I…
So I had some free time last weekend and coded an item store for Team Fortress 2. I collect items and sell them for varying prices, usually one scrap metal each. If you’re interested, check out the store! The store is built on a few components, all written in Python. There is a script to…
It’s no secret to developers of database-driven applications that trying to version a database schema (and seed data) is a royal pain. Propagating changes from your development environment to a live environment is not something that most version control systems are well-equipped to do. This is further complicated by distributed VCSes, like Git — how…
Update 2010-12-17: Those of you who saw this post appear and then vanish were not seeing things. The Mono community identified the contents of this blog post as a serious security vulnerability in Moonlight that, through violation of the type system, allows the CoreCLR security layer to be bypassed. Attackers could potentially run arbitrary code…
Well, if you’ve been waiting for some kind of stable release of OpenVP for Banshee, you will love this. OpenVP is part of the Banshee Community Extensions 1.7.4 release! Go get it, and be sure to file any bugs you come across.
At work, we use Subversion for source control. This is quite the popular VCS, but I’ve grown accustomed to (and much prefer) Git. Don’t get me wrong, SVN has its advantages, but since using Git my workflow has changed quite radically, and it’s difficult to revert to the rather inflexible and tedious SVN workflow. Anyway,…
Update 2010-02-08: Jonathan Pryor has merged many of my extension methods into Cadenza. I’d strongly suggest checking it out. It’s no secret to my friends that I love to program… even more so as I’ve been developing a FarmVille client in C# and having them test it. (As much as you might hate FarmVille, you…