I was recently giving a friend some advice on how to set up a minimal stack for a starter project, and somewhere along the line realized that my MVP was approaching a dozen different AWS services. Time to stop and start reevaluating life decisions, people. So, I went back to the drawing board, and set up […]
Category Archives: Coding
For the last year or so, I’ve been working in a pretty standard Javascript stack – Mongo, Node, Express, React. Modeled on the so-called MEAN stack, this has the advantage of a native Javascript data store along with some reasonably mature tooling. But I wondered – why didn’t this have its own four letter acronym? […]
Consider the generalist software engineer. She has a solid grasp of CS fundamentals, knows several programming languages, can write scripts, program user-facing front-end code, and work on deep algorithmic problems in the backend. For her, coding is a set of logic puzzles, debugging, patterns and anti-patterns, architecture, and tradeoffs between fast, cheap, and good. Most developers […]
I’m a Java guy. Or rather, I’m a C++ guy who ended up in Java. I like statically-typed languages, and think it would be cool if Java had double pointers (or at least reference parameter types) and explicit memory deallocation. I spent the better part of a decade coding video games in C++, and twelve […]
Like peanut butter and chocolate, cut and tr are two great commands that go great together. cut provides an easy way to grab one or more fields from a line of text, and tr allows you to prepare the line first. Let’s start with cut. Consider the following directory listing: # ls -l total 5392 […]
I’m not a Linux guru. I’ve always known just enough to get the job done, but was never focused on getting deep into the command line for its own sake. Ever since joining the devops team at TripAdvisor almost two years ago, though, and more recently taking responsibility for operations at Scratch, I’ve had to learn a much broader array […]
You wouldn’t think that a post like this would be necessary, but as I recently went through a frustrating bit of config hell in what I’d expected to be a straightforward process, I thought I’d write down the procedure that worked for me. Download and install Android Studio Download the latest version Follow the instructions […]
We had a problem. Facebook had just come out with the Like button, and had provided code snippets that allowed you to badge pages with Like counts. The problem was that it took a couple seconds for the number of Likes to load, and in some cases the resulting text was bigger than the allowable […]
I commuted for years. Up and down Route 95, every day, over and over. On a good day it might take me 45 minutes to an hour each way, but one and a half hours was common, and there were a couple of three hour nightmares tucked in over the years. At the same time, […]
In 1997, Clay Christensen published the landmark book The Innovator’s Dilemma. In this book he went through a variety of industries (hard drives, backhoes, steel mills) and demonstrated the frustratingly similar pattern of how companies innovated, then stagnated – for entirely rational reasons. The key graph looks like this: The idea is that for any product, […]
Dan Dreams of Coding 