Compound vs isolation exercises
November 13, 2012If you look at the setup of most commercial gyms today you’ll see row after row of funny looking machines. Each workout machine works a…
Written by Eric Koslow a programmer with too much time on his hands You should follow them on Twitter
Archived Posts
Welcome to my archived posts. These we all written over a decade ago when I was around 20/21. Please don't read too much into them, they were written by a very diffrent person than I am now.
Don't bind your dependencies to one another
November 12, 2012A few years ago I was assembling my main computer from scratch. Trying to keep the insides nice and compact, I used zip ties to bind the…
Introduction to juggling
October 26, 2012How to learn to jungle in three easy steps. 1. Throwing from hand to hand The first step to juggling is working your hand eye coronation…
Work better not faster
October 25, 2012Deadlines are stressful, difficult to meet, and necessary. Without deadlines projects could last forever. A little known fact about the TV…
Demoing to the customer
October 24, 2012Demo days are important. On these days you are given many opportunities. If the customer is new, you have a change to really wow them and…
Test often, for the sake of your brain
October 23, 2012I run my tests as often as I can. Even when I’ve only edited a couple lines of code, I run my tests. To me, tests are a way of saving my…
Slow tests kill the developer
October 22, 2012Problems of slow test: If running your tests takes a non-trivial amount of time, you’ll be more reluctant to run them. If tests start to…
Wear your rain coat
October 19, 2012Applications normally have third party dependencies you don’t control. These dependencies can show up as HTTP calls to foreign servers…
Looking the part
October 17, 2012A consultancy is a service oriented business. As consultants its our job to make our clients happy, but more impotently make their…
Writing a super simple lisp interpreter
October 16, 2012It seems that its every programmers right of passage to write their own lisp interpreter. What most beginner programmers don’t realize is…
Test driven Clojure part VI
October 15, 2012Now we have a text displayed on our site, but its not very pretty. To add some semantic markup we’re going to have to use HTML. We’ll be…
Test driven clojure part V
October 11, 2012We now have passing tests, but our website isn’t very functional. Lets add a home page for our (soon to be) millions of visitors. Writing…
Test driven Clojure part IV
October 10, 2012In a series about tests we haven’t been writing many of them. Lets change that. Writing the first test Lets first start and build up our…
Test driven Clojure part III
October 03, 2012Now that we have Leiningen installed we can start installing the rest of our Clojure toolkit and writing some code. Creating the project.clj…
Test driven Clojure part II
October 02, 2012In my last post we talked about the tools we’re going to use for this project. Now we’re going to get set up with these tools so we can get…
Test driven Clojure part I
October 01, 2012Welcome to my new series Test Driven Clojure. In these series of blog posts we’ll use a collection of open source tools and best testing…
Handling errors in Java
September 19, 2012There are two ways to handle errors in Java; you can handle the error yourself, or make someone else deal with it. The general rule of thumb…
Faking OO in Clojure
September 13, 2012When programming in a functional language, the often comes a time when we must couple data to functions like in an Object Oriented language…
Flash messages in Joodo
September 11, 2012Joodo has built in support for Rails-like flash messages. These are great for persisting one-time messages between requests. First off we…
Writing Joodo middleware
September 04, 2012While working on a Joodo project, I came across the issue of authentication. On a controller by controller basis, we had to redirect users…
Command patten extraction
August 29, 2012In my first iteration of my Limelight interface to mu TTT program I ended up putting all of my application logic inside my player classes…
Saving parentheses using comp
August 28, 2012When I started programming in Clojure I was immediately turned off my all of the parentheses that littered the source code. Over time you…
Introduction to Hyperion
August 27, 2012Hyperion is a common datastore API for Clojure. It wraps various databases in a common API and lets developers hold off the choosing of a DB…
Pain based programming
August 24, 2012According to Forbs, the number one cause of death is premature scaling. I would like to venture that, like startups, the number one cause…
Google oauth in Clojure
August 23, 2012Recently in my Clojure project we had to integrate with Google’s OAuth for authenticating our users. It was a pretty painful process, so…
Overriding functions in Clojure
August 22, 2012While testing in an OO language it is common to mock objects out of the picture. This could be do the fact that the object not yet…
Screaming architecture
August 21, 2012When you look rails application you are greeted with a familiar directory structure. Are given an app/ directory with the folders model…
Introduction to Joodo
August 20, 2012This week I’m diving head first into Clojure and more specifically web development in Clojure. Clojure has a view frameworks to choose from…
Logic-less views
August 13, 2012Views are meant to be dumb displays of simple data. Because of that, views should have no unit testing on top of them. If you feel that you…
Impressing your friends with Ruby
August 08, 2012I’ve been programing in Ruby for a few years now and along the way I’ve picked up a few fun tricks that other programmers rarely seem to…
Don't settle for 99%
August 07, 2012The goal for unit testing is 100% test coverage, but most developers will tell you that not everything will be able to be tested. Most…
OTP: Gen Server part II
August 06, 2012In my last post I introduced the concept of OTP and gen_server. This post I hope to dive deeper into gen_server. We’ve already seen the…
OTP: Gen Server
August 03, 2012This will be the first of many posts coming up on Erlang’s OTP library. If you have never heard of OTP, let me explain. When Erlang was…
Endless pagination in Jekyll
August 02, 2012Yesterday I decided to move my blog over from my own custom solution to Jekyll. The process mostly involved renaming and shuffling a lot…
Outdated in 60 secs
August 01, 2012In my last post I talked about Make and Makefiles in Elixir projects. It turns out that that post is already outdated information. What…
Elixir make files
July 31, 2012One of the common practices in Elixir is to use Makefiles and the Make compiling utility. Make was first released in 1977 and can be found…
Testing Elixir
July 30, 2012When learning a new linage, one of the first steps one needs to take is learning its testing frameworks. Elixir being a relatively new…
Simple TCP server in Elixir
July 27, 2012One of my favorite functional languages is Erlang. First created in 1986, Erlang is a highly concurrent language with high fault tolerance…
Do not count on persistent state
July 26, 2012Today I finished moving my Tic Tac Toe program to the web. Before the game ran on a loop, and a single game object was constantly fed new…
Refactoring
July 25, 2012Programs rot. Without tender love and care, they become unmaintainable. They only way to fight this process is through continuous…
Code katas
July 24, 2012When I was a kid I remember taking a karate class for gym. During the class we were taught to perform “katas”. Katas were a series of moves…
Clojure first impressions
July 23, 2012First of all, a little background about my experience with Clojure before now. Though I have never written in Clojure before, I have…
Tracking down slow code
July 20, 2012Sometimes code runs slowly. A method call takes longer than you expect, and your application starts becoming unresponsive. When this happens…
Getting started with Ruby curses
July 19, 2012This week I was playing around with creating a complex terminal game. I immediately though about Curses. If you don’t know Curses is an old…
The danger of too many classes
July 16, 2012In my last post I talked about refactoring its advantages. But there is a danger of refactoring too much. By following all the right rules…
Static code analysis
July 12, 2012On the way to being a great programmer, everyone hits the same roadblock. Code Smells. One of the tools I have started using to help me…
Minimax tic tac toe
July 11, 2012I already implemented TicTacToe using heuristics, today I was given the task to reimplement my TicTacToe AI using the MiniMax algorithm. If…
Chrome web store
May 31, 2011Last week I launched Japanese Vocab Tutor mostly to be able to say I published an app. The actual application took about two days to create…
Sinatra vs Rails
May 13, 2011When first getting into Ruby, I thought Rails was coolest thing since dynamic variables. It was pure magic. Using a complicated mix of meta…
Building a blog
May 12, 2011There comes a time in every up and coming web developer’s life that he realizes that he/she needs a blog. And at that time they know that…