Ben Wendt's blog

My work (TWG) has a 3D printer for employees to play with and use. Sometime last summer I downloaded some train tracks from thingiverse and printed them for my son to play with. He loves the custom tracks dearly. He’s always excited to visit my work to see what a coworker called “the toy factory”. And often he will ask me to print him something while I’m at work. So I get a lot of emotional reward from using this machine.

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A coworker recently filled my ear with praise for vue.js. I’m always eager to try new frameworks, and the benefits over angular (namely performance and simplicity) sound really promising. I haven’t had a chance to develop anything serious with this, but my initial attempt was exhilirating.

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Last month a workmate and I flew down to San Francisco to go to elasticon.

I attended an interesting talk given two employees of Giant Oak. Giant Oak does contracting for government agencies to try to solve social problems. I am not sure if this is their motto but one of the speakers say that they “see the people behind the data,” which sounds really cool.

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In irb,

fork

Now typing exit will not work because your keystrokes might go to either the parent process or the forked child process. I found it to be impossible to get the characters exit to coherently all go to the same process.

For my “I had trouble finding this on google” series, here’s a solution I found to getting a total duration from a collection of objects with durations stored as Time objects.

total_duration = durations.reduce(Time.gm(2000)) do |total, time|
  total += time.to_i
end

There are two little tricks happening here. The first is that durations are stored as a time of day on January 1st, 2000, so we use that as the reduce seed. The second thing is that the Time class defines addition for integer objects, but not for other times, so you have to convert your duration to an integer first.

No rocket science here, but a couple little quirks that made it a little harder to add two times together than I expected.

Every programmer has some level of interest in knowing how to write a language. I’ve always wanted to tinker with this level of software development, but even after years of development experience you never really get exposed to this stuff because what’s already there generally just works. On top of that, it’s a somewhat complex process involving several steps with intimidating terminology.

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My old “attach a camera to your RC car” tutorial has been republished into a “1-2-3 Projects” anthology by maker media.

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