Tag: has-code

CloudFlare recently informed me that this website was getting thousands of hits every day, which is an unusual occurrence. I pulled up Google Analytics to figure out where all that traffic was coming from, only to be informed that I was getting three to four hundred daily visitors at most. This felt a bit suspicious,…

Designed by Steve Dekorte, Io is a small, embeddable programming language that borrows its prototype-based object model from Self, its purely object-oriented nature from Smalltalk, and its homoiconicity from Lisp (although, unlike Lisp, it doesn’t use s-expressions to represent programs). The language is such a mind-expanding experience that I have now spent way more than…

In an attempt to get back into programming language theory and implementation—a hobby I’ve neglected since I started working full-time—I recently started reading Bruce Tate’s Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. These are my notes and observations from my first week of study. In week 1, Bruce introduces Ruby, drawing attention to its dynamic nature, expressive…

This case study was first published on the Alaris Prime blog on January 4, 2017. You can read the original case study here. Part 1 of this case study was a general overview of how the Alaris Prime team rebuilt abof.com to load almost instantly even on flaky mobile connections, and part 2 was an…

I recently migrated my self-hosted Jekyll blog to Medium. I have no specific reason for choosing Medium, except that it’s in vogue in the communities I follow. I don’t have strong opinions about blogging platforms. What follows is a quick account of how I made the transition. Step 0: Set Up a Medium Publication This…

As I usually do after wrapping up a long-term consulting project, I recently took a long break from work to level-up my programming skills. On my list of technologies to muck around with were Angular 2, TypeScript, and RxJS. I like to have a small, fun project to hack on when I’m learning a new…

Spin.js is a tiny JavaScript library that helps you create beautiful loading spinners on every web browser up from IE6. It is highly customizable, fast, and has zero dependencies. I’m using it in my AngularJS application to display loading spinners inside my ng-views while my REST API responds with the data the view needs to…

I am currently working on a single page web application written with AngularJS that communicates with a REST API written with Django and Tastypie. Since I run both the client and the server locally on my machine, every HTTP request that my AngularJS application makes receives a response from the REST API in tens of…

If you use Tastypie with Django’s timezone support turned on (i.e, you have USE_TZ = True in your settings.py), you will notice that Tastypie helpfully converts all dates and times in your resources to the timezone specified in your TIME_ZONE setting before returning them. If you care about internationalization, this is not the behavior you…

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently switched my website from my homegrown Django blogging app to WordPress. Before installing WordPress on my VPS, I installed it on a VM so I could test the waters before jumping in. I created an Ubuntu 12.04 VM using VirtualBox and gave it a gigabyte of…