Justin Abrahms - Principal Engineer & Technical Leader on Justin Abrahms

I recently sat down to write a node service and happened upon a very helpful workflow when trying to write tests that I wanted to share.

Table of Contents Early Initialization (Emacs 27+) Pre-install TODOs Initial setup Performance Optimization Package Management with straight.el Straight.el usage guide Base UI Configuration Minor Mode Display Management Modern UI Configuration Themes Addi…

There have been a few discussions around the node.js community around why someone might want a foundation similar to the ones created by the Python or Django communities.

One of the difficulties in learning to program is not the specific syntax it takes to accomplish a goal, but the thinking that went behind it.

Python’s setuptools has a rather interesting feature called “entry points” which facilitates plugin discovery.

My wife attended Cascadia JS 2013 and I tagged along to join the significant other track, which was really just an excuse to visit Vancouver for a weekend.

Part of a healthy engineering culture is having a good code review process.

Over the holiday break, I got a long-standing side project into a working state.

PyCon was a ton of fun this year.

We do a bunch of code reviews at Sprint.ly.

This year, I helped mentor NodeConf 2014, which was an amazing experience.

Working in tech, programmers are often brought in to apply automation to processes as a means to increase productivity.

This weekend, I competed in Node Knockout, a 48-hour coding competition designed around Node.js.

At Sprint.ly, we’ve been investing in the longer term health of our code base.

Ryan Roemer, the author of Backbone.js Testing, wrote a post to the Seattle-area JavaScript developer’s mailing list to ask if anyone was interested in reviewing his book.

There are a lot of questions that pop up when you’re changing an entry in your style guide.

I was having a conversation recently around the value of databases as opposed to flat files and the question “What is the essence of a database?”

In a word: Stagnant# Code review is an essential part of a team’s shipping process.

I’ve started the motions for a book that teaches computer science information to people who didn’t go through a university program.

Calculating Big-O# This is the second in a three post series.

Computer Science / Engineering# Binary Protocols Security Sockets Packets low-level networking Systems Coding (aka linux syscall apis) Compilers Assembly 3D Graphics Programming Animation Binary Compatibility File systems Writing a virus C++ Mathematics#…

This is the first in a three post series.

Pisces is a Python web framework that was written with testing in mind.

In releasing the web framework I’ve been working on, I went about providing the things any upstanding python project does: a CI configuration file, a setup.py and some tests.

Bitten by the bug to write more and for others, I’ve brought back syndication (via Atom rather than RSS) to the blog.

In an effort to clean up some code, I wanted to find a list of files not imported by my app.

With the recent news surrounding privacy implications here in the US, I’ve taken it as an opportunity to encrypt and sign more emails that I send.

Rick Turoczy wrote an article about the role of meaning in the Work-Life balance equation.

One of the best talks at PyCon 2013 was Gary Barnhardt’s Boundaries talk.

In playing with GitStreams, I’ve made the switch from MySQL to Postgres.

I’ve recently volunteered to help out Code Scouts, a non-profit organization tasked with helping people learn programming and increase diversity in the field.

Justin {Lilly,Abrahms}# I got married, my wife and I chose to change our names.

Great possibilities, solid direction# Gittip is a service for donating money to people (initially, open source developers, but could be for anyone) with no strings attached.

Same stuff, less money# In an effort to be more frugal, I’ve recently altered my cellphone plan to one in which I get unlimited data and text messages for $30/mo.

Beliefs in action# I’ve been doing a bit of thinking lately about my own personal values and how they drive my decisions on a day-to-day basis.

As part of my ongoing love affair with emacs, I’ve started annotating my dotfiles with org-babel.

Git is a DVCS or a distributed version control system.

While the majority of my shell work these days is done from within emacs using eshell, there are remote servers where its nice to have things setup in a familiar way.

Tmux is a Terminal MUltipleXer, which is a fancy way of saying its a tabbing system for terminals.

Every example below hands its collaborators to the class through the constructor.

You might look at Python code every day, but what is the lens through which you view code?

/Note: This article was originally published in the September 2008 edition of Python Magazine.

This site is now generated through org-mode, an emacs library which is used for outlining.

A bit inspired by all the awesome stuff happening at PyCon, I’ve done a bit of hacking on my shell to improve the use of virtualenvwrapper.

On Michael Trier’s suggestion, I’ve decided to make Vim my primary editor once again.

This is a relatively short screencast on a few different ways to select text in Vim.

Having tried for literally days to get a legible screencast uploaded and online to any of a number of video services, I’ve decided to link to the actual file itself.

In my latest screencast, I’ve gone a bit longer than normal (about 7 minutes) in order to cover an introduction to vim.

Here’s another in my series of vim screencasts.

In deploying my latest side project, I came across a conundrum.