Can we create a tool that allows users to specify constraints in a spreadsheet and then solve them?

Schedule talks for a multi-track conference with an eye to avoiding conflicts

Use dotbot to link your dotfiles to the right spots on macOS, Linux and Windows

Setting up neovim smart-splits with kitty on macOS

VS Code Rewrap is a handy extension for wrapping long comments in your code.

Astro View Transitions can break Alpine.js components. Here's how to fix it.

Setting up a JavaScript package repo with multiple packages, TypeScript, testing, codegen, and automatic releases

Can we solve the Letter Boxed puzzle with a regex?

A look at the challenges faced by the Grammarly for Developers team when fixing a bug in the Grammarly Text Editor Plugin.

How to recover a lost git commit message

I've been swimming a lot recently. I find swimming to be pretty boring, so I've been listening to music with swim headphones to occupy my mind. A few weeks ago, my cheapo headphones were stolen from the side of the pool. To replace them, I bought some Shokz OpenSwim headphones. Wow, these are so much better.

A comparison of two tools for managing version numbers and changelogs in a monorepo

Contentful's migration strategy is lacking. Here's how I've worked around it.

How to pass an array as a parameter to a raw SQL query in Rails

A comparison of Alpine.js and Stimulus.js for adding interactivity to server-rendered pages (Alpine.js wins IMO).

How to avoid CORS restrictions by setting up a proxy with AWS Cloudfront

Clipbox is a little utility that I've been using in some form or another for years. It is a utility that provides a keyboard shortcut to select a region of the screen, upload the screenshot to a server, and put a link to the image on your clipboard.

Save a snapshot of an Aurora Serverless database to an S3 bucket

Solving a difficult problem with Aurora Serverless

A technique for breaking bash pipelines into smaller, more easily debuggable pieces.

Use parcel to build a browser extension with Vue

A coworker had a question about combining the values from multiple javascript Promises. I've tried to cull the interesting Promise construction out of the original problem, and came up with an example about pizza.

A technique for getting work done in the face of overwhelming challenges.

We'll explore two different approaches to solving the same problem: Inheritance and Composition. At first glance, the Inheritance example looks more correct and is a bit shorter. I want to convince you that the Composition approach is more correct.

Using linear programming to schedule a medical residency program

Migrating a small ASP.NET web api from .NET Framework 4.6 to .NET Core.

Using CloudFront to host a single-page web app and avoid CORS issues

A list of software I find useful for programming on MacOS, circa 2018.

A detective story of debugging a Cloudfront 502 error

Using JSON Schema to validate pokemon documents in MongoDB.

Using a Proxy object to enforce making a deep copy of default values on read.

A detective story tracking down why d3.event was null in a throttled function.

A quick script to inline styles in SVGs

Python's context managers are a great feature. Here's how to approximate them in JavaScript.

High volume tables can run out of ids. Here's how to convert a Django model's primary key to a bigint.

Ensuring merge migrations are unique in Django

How to set up pass, the open source password manager, with Alfred on OSX

When your decorators want to meddle with the function's arguments, things can get tricky. Here's a pattern for writing decorators that need to access the function's arguments.

Use selenium to check for unread Facebook messages and send a reply

Acquire and release postgres advisory locks from python with a decorator

Decorators look like magic when you first see them, but they don’t feel like something mere mortals could write. We’ll go through some examples of exactly how they work (without the scary <code>@</code> syntax), and why they are a nice pattern for writing elegant, easy to understand code.

Share your terminal with friends!

Disappointed by the lack of an official Facebook app for your Mac? Make your own! (download provided for the lazy)

Event-triggered averages, also known as Peristimulus Time Histograms (PETHs) are a method of analysis commonly used in neuroscience, but also in the finance industry and others.

Professors teaching Concurrency classes are fond of saying that when there is a race condition in your code, anything can happen. But can it?

Everyone's happy to hear that a test will be curved, but what does that even mean?

Every December, undergrads across the country take the Putnam Exam, regarded as one of the toughest math competitions around. This is a walkthrough of a problem from the 2010 test.

You can be half muggle, quarter muggle, or even 13/16 muggle. But can you be 1/3 muggle?

This LaTeX package alleviates the constant struggle in mathematical writing of finding synonyms for 'therefore'.

As part of the UNIX Systems class at WWU, each student makes a basic shell program, msh.

LaTeX is a markup language that's particularly useful for typesetting mathematics. When I was at WWU, I taught a 1.5 hour class covering the basics.