Featured 50 Stars - Puzzle Solver (of Little Renown) I’ve completed all of this year’s Advent of Code puzzles! This is a first for me. I’ve taken part in previous years’ challenges, even gotten pretty close to finishing in a prior year, but this is the first time I’ve managed to do the whole thing.
Don't Trust AI - An Advent of Code Tale Or: Trust but Verify AI I’ve been working on Advent of Code 2023 and having a good time. I might even complete them all this time as I’ve historically fallen off usually due to the typical hustle and bustle that December creates. You can find my code for
Condoning Another Pi Day 11/24 wasn't just Black Friday. It became another Pi day around here. We had pie for breakfast, leftover from Thanksgiving. We had Quiche, an egg pie, for lunch. Finally, for dinner, we had ourselves some pizza pie from a local woodfire place that was delicious. For dessert, yep, more
ANSI Terminal Colors Every so often I decide I want to make some changes to my terminal or add colors to a script and then I have to go looking up a list of color codes. Data available here. To save future me some time, and perhaps present you, here are some tables
elixir WTF is Idiomatic In a recent post I used the word "idiomatic" more than once and had to make sure I was using right. Then, someone asked me what the hell it meant so I figured others might also wonder what it means and figured I'd write another post about it because content,
elixir From Early Return in OOP to Control Flow in Elixir: A Transition Guide In OOP it's best practice to "return early" but Elixir doesn't have a return keyword, so how does this work?
Ghost Blog backup to Astro markdown The Problem: I believe I have mentioned here in the past my desire to leave the Ghost Blog platform in favor of using Astro for at least some of my blogs. To be clear, I love the Ghost platform, but I've long been interested in moving to a more simplistic
fundamentals The Twelve-Factor App: A Guideline for Building Modern Web Applications Introduction In the realm of software development, the Twelve-Factor App methodology onced garnered significant attention as a guide for building scalable, maintainable, and portable software-as-a-service applications. I guess. To be honest, I hadn't really thought about it specifically in some years until a recent job posting mentioned it alongside the
fundamentals Thinking S.R.P. in S.O.L.I.D. You're no doubt familiar with SOLID, a set of guiding design principles for OOP meant to help create more maintainable and scalable software. I was recently talking with someone who was having a hard time understanding SRP in practice. I figured they probably weren't alone as I recall having not
Playdate Group 4 Represent! I've made my first game for the Playdate! Behold: Actually, that's not fair, this is actually a game that they've made, but I'm responsible for the sprite that I doodled that's moving around. This is the result of this script in their excellent docs. Panic is a fantastic group of
Initial Impression of Claude.ai Recently a friend introduced Claude.ai from Antrhopic to our chat. I've not found myself with the correct combination of time, energy, interest, and motivation to get back to my elxrBB project, I still think about it, though, and would like to focus there, but it is hard when it
fundamentals Iteration v. Recursion I was chatting recently with another engineer who was sharing their desire to have started working through leetcode problems sooner in their career. They, having recently been let go from their gig, like so many folks I know, are working toward leveling up while on the hunt for their next
The Power of Psychological Safety in High-Performing Teams I have wanted for awhile to re-visit the topic of Psychological Safety after my previous post on the topic to create a slightly more succinct an thoughtful post. Here it is: In the corporate world, the pursuit of high-performing teams is a top priority. Many businesses focus on acquiring top
alt-LGTM 👍 Recently a colleague metioned they thought LGMT stood for Let's Get This Merged and I'd always thought it meant Looks Good To Me. This amused me so I asked ChatGPT for some additional examples and there's some real gems in here: Leverage Global Talent More Love Grows Through Music Light
2023-04-23 - project blog - elxrBB- Entry #2 What a journey this has been. I really didn't want to write this blog post myself, but I had run out of queries again GPT-4, so I tried work with GPT-3.5 to produce a blog post for me instead and, after several iterations back and forth about what I
A Year Later: Still Burnt Out Introduction Burnout is an experience that many professionals face at some point in their careers. A year ago, I took a drastic step to address my burnout, stepping down from an Engineering Manager role to become a Senior Software Engineer. While this decision was beneficial in many ways, I continue
2023-04-02 - project blog - elxrBB- Innaugural Entry Having reached the end of my first weekend collaborating with ChatGPT (GPT-4), I wanted to take a moment to reflect over the experience thus far. I’m referring to an ambitious project called elxrBB, which I’m almost certain to eventually abandon due to OSTD (Ooh, shiny thing! Disorder) but
fundamentals A Swift Dive into the Gang of Four Design Patterns The Gang of Four (GoF) design patterns are a collection of 23 time-tested software design patterns, introduced by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides in their seminal book "Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software". These patterns provide a common vocabulary and best practices for software developers,
fundamentals Types of Tests in Laravel Laravel is a popular PHP web application framework, and testing is an essential part of its development process. Laravel provides a suite of tools for creating and executing tests, making it easier to ensure your application works as expected. Here's a breakdown of the different types of tests you might
The Value of Making Mistakes Mistakes are how we learn. From the time that we’re young, we make mistakes as we try to understand and interact with the world around us. Making mistakes is a vital part of our growth and forms the foundation for our successes. Mistakes help us to discover our limits,
debugging Me: Add An Admin, Ghost: Oh, Actually I'm Broken TL;DR Mail settings were broken :rolleyes:
The Value of the Retrospective (by ChatGPT) I, like many humans, have been interested in ChatGPT and have toyed a bit it as a "writing partner" Recently I tried to get it to generate a couple blog posts for me. I think it actually did a remarkable job. The following prompt was written after I'd worked with
Psychological Safety (by ChatGPT) I have begun to toy with ChatGPT, like so many others out there. It's a fascinating technology. It's shocking how often it's been wrong, it's fascinating to have it offer code and concepts that are just fundamentally flawed, and I'm blown away when it's racist, sexist, or mysognist: it feels
fundamentals Understanding ACID Properties: The Pillars of Reliable Database Management Introduction In the domain of database management, the ACID properties stand as fundamental principles to ensure data integrity and transactional reliability. The acronym ACID refers to Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability. Each of these properties plays a crucial role in the functioning of database systems, particularly in environments where multiple
How to Create Bootable USB in Linix Terminal TL;DR: `sudo dd if=distro.iso of=/dev/sda status=progress`
