August 6, 2014

##The Better Way: NPM When I’ve upgraded Node in the past, I’ve had to go to the nodejs.org site and pull a new image. This gets a little annoying after a couple times. There has to be a better way, right? Turns out there is: via NPM. NPM (Node Package Manager) is fantastic; it’s a great way to manage, install, uninstall, and register packages. To upgrade Node to a new version, you can use the n package.

July 27, 2014

In Praise of The CLI One reason the GUI exists is to speed up and make clearer basic user interaction with a computer. Take, for example, moving around the Finder on OSX. If you want to open a file, you have to use a series of visual representation using the mouse as your only means of navigation. Cool, right? In many ways, the GUI is incredible; it is in part what has enabled computers to become so useful in the world.

July 27, 2014

One of the first hurdles I ran into when getting started with Rails 4 is sending/receiving mail locally. I’d wired up my basic app and started to sign in for the first time when I realized that I’d given the confirmation email no way to go anywhere. With some authentication gems can loook in the logs for your local rack server and see the confirmation token, but that gets old quickly and you’re quite limited in what you can do.

July 26, 2014

Concise Overview of CS Math Even though my academic background is primarily in the humanities and biochemistry, my foundations/training in math is somewhat limited when compared to what the typical comptuer science or engineering major would normally go through. As such, I’ve been doing self-remediation through the wonderful (actual and otherwise) repositories of free knowledge available to us through that whole internet thing. One resource that I’ve really enjoyed is an overview of mathematics for computer science by Prof.

July 8, 2014

One of my favorite books on programming so far has been Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship (Get it here). It’s full of great wisdom on writing–you guessed it–clean code. Clean code not only makes your life better, but it will save your friends and teammates hours of headaches. And perhaps even more importantly, it reflects a care for craft and excellence in your work. Anyways, enough from me; here’s a few great quotes from a few greats on writing clean code:

July 7, 2014

###Ghosting Around I’ve been tinkering around with Ghost recently and found it to be a new but promising platform in the main. There are certainly some things it will need to achieve any sort of significant user-base (plugins, apps, etc., which are coming in future releases https://github.com/tryghost/ghost/). At the very least, it’s great that there are open-source, well-supported options for blogging platforms that aren’t Wordpress and it’s cousins. I suppose it can’t hurt Nodejs and Javascript Development in general either for there to be more people using node-based platforms either.

July 6, 2014

Check back tomorrow!