posts

Here’s a few tricks for rendering markdown in GitHub that most people wouldn’t know about. Oh, and they work for new Issues, Pull Requests, and in the Wiki too!

I’ve always been a fan of wikis, but GitHub’s is so poorly designed it doesn’t get much love. I once wrote about cloning a wiki locally and editing it using Gollum, but now I’m taking a look at hosting it externally on DigitalOcean, using Gollum and keeping it in sync with the repo hosted on GitHub.

Handling date and times is a thorn in every experienced developer’s side. If you haven’t had the pleasure yet, you will. ;) Coming off a week of standardizing some datetimes across an Erlang app, here’s a few personal thoughts.

Despite its marketing, Visual Studio for Mac is not the Visual Studio that millions love, ported to the Mac. Something that’s absolutely trivial in standard VS, switching between .NET Frameworks, wasted several of my evenings. Maybe it’ll help someone else.

If you work with the .NET Framework long enough, you may eventually find yourself tasked with converting one language to another, either by request or necessity. But conversion isn’t always necessary - it’s possible (and easy!) to have one solution with multiple languages.

I wrote a small library for calculating Easter and other holidays in Erlang. Here’s how I did it and what I learned.

The Wayback Machine, a product of the Internet Archive, is an ambitious tool that’s been documenting websites for many years. It’s useful when a page you need is removed by the original author. Let’s take a look at their API and how we might make use of it.

After writing about so many APIs and having to figure out the auth process for each, I wanted to compare and contrast how some of these services approach authentication and authorization, and why they might’ve decided to do it the way they did.

Have you ever had a collection of items and needed to select a random one from the lot? What if you have a class with some property (i.e. ‘age’ or ‘weight’) that you want to take into account when doing the random selection? Let’s see how we might approach that…

Have you ever tried to execute a function at some future time in Erlang? You can, with a timer, but the compiler may complain that the function you’re calling via the timer is unused. Why is that and what can you do?