Development on John Hamelink

Tweaking Emacs for Ruby Development in 2023

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 22:00:00 +0100

Preamble

Since I started a new job in April, I’ve been spending the majority of my time with legacy Ruby code for the first time since 2017 (I’d been mainly working on Elixir and Typescript codebases between then and now).

Before my start-date at the new job, I spent some time setting up a basic Emacs configuration for Ruby. I’d made a good start, but with all those unknown unknowns swimming around, I was only able to make vague assumptions about what I needed. I’ve since done a bunch more tweaking to get a configuration that works well with the development environment in this company.

My Perfect Livecoding steam for OSX

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 12:00:00 +0100

I’ve been interested in live streaming for a while now. I’ve been playing with Livecoding.tv on and off, and through this experience I’ve had to deal with the crappy internet connections and configuration complications I’ve had to figure out. I thought I’d document my current configuration so that I might help make other potential streamers’ experiences a bit smoother.

Prerequisites

I’m using OBS to stream on osx Yosemite. I’m using a 15" Macbook Pro Mid-2014. I’m using Bluetooth headphones which complicate my setup somewhat. My machine has 16GB of ram, a 2.2Ghz core i7, and an SSD. Your mileage may vary - this is what works for me on my connection, with my computer’s spec. If you interent connection is more or less symetric than mine, this configuration will probably be sub-optimal, but hopefully it will point you in the right direction.

Consuming Nested API Routes with Ember

Sat, 28 Feb 2015 21:39:00 +0000

At the time of writing I’m learning Ember-cli for the first time. It’s pretty tough as there’s not too much up-to-date documentation out there, but I’m slowly getting there, and I’m beginning to feel the power it brings.

One of the things I’ve been finding especially difficult is grokking how Ember consumes API data - specifically how it decides upon what the route it wants to consume looks like.

After hours of fruitless Googling and reading, I relented and hit IRC: #emberjs on Freenode to be specific. After speaking to a few helpful fellows on there, it became clear that Ember was not easily able to consume nested API routes just yet. Damn! That makes scoping your API data quite hard!

Testing NodeJS with Jenkins

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 18:00:00 +0000

NodeJS is awesome. I’ve used it for many pet projects and have worked on commercial projects which have made good use of Node in sticky situations. When it comes to testing Node, we’re spoiled. My favourite testing framework is Mocha and my favourite testing library is should.js. We’ll be using that alongside Jenkins to build an automated test suite for our demo repository.

You Will Need

Mocha

Mocha is our testing framework. We use it to describe the tests we want to make.

The Green Developer

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:16:00 +0000

A good developer is energy conscious. A good developer understands the impact he has on the environment around him. A good developer is able to take all these things and use them to make a positive impact in his universe. A good developer is a green developer.

A green developer? What are you smoking?

A green developer understands how to build in blocks: he must master the art of software engineering versus software developing. What sets the software engineer apart from the developer is not speed, agility or knowledge, it is the ability to recognise and compartmentalise everything he does into reusable chunks. Why? Simply because reusable code means better code and also half the code.

What makes for a Good Development Lead?

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:31:00 +0000

Throughout my career so far, I’ve mostly worked alone. When I say alone, I’ve often worked alongside other people, but ultimately I’ve been paying them, or I had made the choice about whether they were suitable for the project (or for me) or not. They’ve mostly not been working on the same thing I’ve been working on either.

Ultimately, I’ve been the leader of the projects I’ve worked on during most of my freelance career. While at my current fulltime job however, due to the nature of the work I was doing there, I often had to work with other people who I couldn’t choose. This was a great new experience for me, with some terrible 3rd parties from other companies I had to integrate with, and some truly amazing developers I got the chance to work alongside. I learned a lot about what I look for in a leader during my time there, based on excellent leadership skills I saw working with some of the people I worked with, and with other people I saw (mostly in other companies I’m happy to report) make mistakes, I learned how I myself could strive to be that golden leader I wanted so bad. While I don’t claim to be perfect, I feel I have manage to construct a reasonably good guideline on how I should try to conduct myself in order to be the leader I would want to lead me.

Code is Poetry

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:19:00 +0000

I once read a much better article than this one by Matt Ward that attempts to show the similarity between code and poetry. Matt shows how the flow and syntax of good code, that abstract minimalism and lowest common denominator approach, is actually very similar to that of a poem.

I agree with everything Matt says, but I felt the article was a little lacking in showing how the coder can be a poet in order to achieve greatness and self-fulfillment (that’s what poetry and coding are partly about, in my opinion). To this end, I’ve compiled some advice I’ve learned by myself or from others over the years in the hope that it will help someone out there on these vast pipes we call the Internets.