C++ is weird Some people love it and others would rather remove their fingernails with pliers than program in it. I find myself falling in both camps; sometimes at the same time. I have an inkling that my software engineering journey has a lot to do with my feelings towards it. C++ is my... educatio...
A factory in perspective There are two modern perspectives on factories. On one hand, there's a view that the factory is a paragon of efficiency, process management, and virtue. It's a black box and transmutation circle — you throw raw materials in one end and get a polished, finished product out t...
Principles and Patterns (I wax lyrically a bit about software design; if you just want the code click here) My Principles and Patterns of Software Design class (what a mouthful) was one of the most important classes I took during my time at UVU. Most of the subject matter was based off of a modified...
First posts deserve a look at my first projects, at least, that's the line of thinking and reasoning that has been bouncing around my head for a bit. I shall declare this my First Case Study. The first class that had me cobble together an interactive, non-console, and non-trivial project was my web ...
Integers Are Nice It’s been a while since I’ve had to worry about types and their nuances. JavaScript has been at the core of my stack for the past couple years now. Between Node and Vue (and wanting to dabble in ReasonML on the side), I’m immersed in the JS landscape. I never imagined that a dynami...
Fall is here The weather is getting cooler; leaves are changing color, the wind is picking up, and people are cracking jokes about pumpkin spice lattes left and right. October is here, and with it, Hacktoberfest If you don't know what that is, here is a short snippet from the official Hacktoberfest...
What to do One of the biggest issues I face when I get a new project-computer or toy is the dilemma of picking what to do with it. The computer itself is a blank slate; truly a paragon of hope, and possibility. It gets to the point where I get overwhelmed with all the choices I have. There are quite...
Queues are the backbone to asynchronous communication and message passing in any application of consequence. And yet, they're not as understood as they should be. I had no exposure to queues or queueing technology in my university studies (and mind you, I don't mean the data structure — I listened t...
Python's Such a Pretty Language Revisiting old Python code is always such a treat. Its easy to see what was going on and what the code is actually doing. It is so simple to trace and read, rarely do I ever ask myself What idiot wrote this? Only to later find out through a commit or comment that I ...
There comes a moment in every tech-inclined person's life where they look at some service on the internet and think "Man, I could host that". My time is now. Why can't I hold all of these ~limes~ CAT 6 cables? Pi-hole Pi-hole — the place where ads go to die™ Or as they put it, and maybe with a litt...
Click me if you wanna get right to testing It is now 2017 Happy belated new year. Its been about nine months now. Change is constant and inevitable. In this year alone I have: Gotten a new and exciting job,...
A frictionless development environment is hard to achieve. It's harder to make that repeatable and idempotent on every developer's machine in an org. A few sticking points for any org of a particular size are: Onboarding new software engineers quickly, quietly, and with as little fuss as possible B...
Frontend programming is hard Frontend programming is difficult to do rigorously. It's too easy to cobble together some frontend code that kinda works. Crafting a good user experience with a coherent UI is a craft and a science. And to be honest, a good UX/UI usually makes or breaks a product. The wo...
I Dig Node I remember when I was a fledgling programmer and Node was something I had just learned about; I remember thinking "Server side Javascript? That sounds like the worst thing ever". After tinkering with it and working with it professionally for about a year, I had a change of heart. Node ful...