Writings

I’ve done a fair amount of writing on other topics and in other blogs. I’ve collected a list of those here. Many are invited guest author posts or are from Bendyworks’ blog. If you’ve liked what I’ve said so far, then go check these out:

• Applicative Validation - or - Rails Validation Considered Weird: written for “Functional Ruby.” An article where I imagine what Rails would look like if it used applicative-style validation instead of pushing things onto an errors hash.
• Craftsman Swap Podcast: Devin and I were interviewed on the Relevance podcast talking about Craftsman swaps
• George Boole Returned as a Zombie and is Gnawing on My Brain: I suggest that introducing richer boolean operators in languages my help to clean up complex logical statements. In particular, material implication is a neglected, but really useful, operation.
• Cthulhuian Document Preparation With Troff: I discuss how to use the UNIX tool, troff.
• Don’t Say ‘Emacs’ or ‘Vi’: What is your favorite editor besides Emacs or Vi? Do you have one? Back when you started programming, what did you use? In this short listicle, I talk about four editors, sorted in autobiographical order.
• Getting Plan 9 Running on the Raspberry Pi: Combining my love for Plan 9 with my attraction to small PCs, this article is a HOWTO for getting Plan 9 to run on the RasPi. This is a perennially popular article because it’s linked from the Plan 9 from Bell Labs Wikipedia page. People around the office are jelly at my link karma here.
• Styleguide Rails: I describe the benefits of Joe Nelson’s Styleguide Rails gem.
• From Ruby to Haskell, Part 1: Testing: this post kicks off my epic Haskell N-ology by talking about what Ruby programmers would find very familiar about testing in Haskell. It also talks about some things that Ruby programmers would find very unfamiliar, property-based testing.
• From Ruby to Haskell, Part 2: Similarity, Refactoring, and Patterns: in this part in the series, I talk about how being lazy, pure, and functional make for some really sweet refactoring. I also talk about a common and useful structure in Haskell, the monoid.
• From Ruby to Haskell, Part 3: Lazy Evaluation: this part in the series talks about all of the nice benefits that one gets from laziness, or non-strict evaluation and how, even if you think you don’t, you probably do use it frequently in Ruby.
• What can SQL do for you? this is a writeup of my guest blog post for the Changelog entitled: Rails and SQL’s Relationship Status: “It’s Complicated” where I describe my open source gem, Reactive Record. After reading this, I suggest you go and take a look at the paper Out of the Tar Pit by Ben Moseley and Peter Marks. The system they describe is what I, unknowingly, am getting at.
• Lists out of Lambdas and Boxes out of Functions: I riff on SICP and show how code and data really are two different views of the same thing.
• The Migrationless Migration: This article talks about how actual database tables could be hidden through the use of database views. Application code could be made unaware of the underlying schema of the database.