28. March 2017
Adding Database Constraints Using the `rein` Gem
rein is a gem for adding database constraints in rails migrations. It’s always been possible to set these up using execute calls in the migration, but rein makes it look rails-y.
27. January 2017
Verifying methods using rubycheck
rubycheck is a library implementing similar functionality to the quickcheck library in haskell. Using rubycheck, you can write assertions that a method works for all given inputs meeting a given criteria. Of course, the implementation is to just try a bunch of options and see whether they all meet the desired outcome. Using rubycheck gives you the power to verify your code works for a wider variety of cases than you might normally put into a unit test (or at least lets you hide the random input generator within a gem).
02. January 2017
Understanding L-Systems
I’ve been playing around with processing a lot over the holidays. I’ve been watching some of Daniel Shiffman’s coding challenge videos, including the intro to L-Systems, and decided to try it out.
An L-System is a set of rules for rewriting a string. This generally creates recursive patterns in the generated strings, and in all the examples I’ve worked on, these are used to build turle graphics programs.
04. October 2016
Trying Out Perfect
I’ve been meaning to try out swift for a while. I finally got some motivation to push it to the top of the “things to learn” queue today, when a coworker announced an upcoming seminar at work, all about learning perfect, which is one of the leading web frameworks written in swift.
15. September 2016
My first slack bot
I am still working on picking up some elixir, so when a coworker mentioned that writing a Slack bot is cool, I decided to give that a try. Slack is a bit easier to work with than IRC because the communication is done in JSON so you can skip a step in message parsing.