James Cash's blog

I keep looking at “Source Hut” (née “srht”) and its email-centric approach to git.

As I aluded to previously, something that’s come to be a warning sign to me is when people complain about “bloat” in software.

There are a few phrases in the popular lexicon that I’ve developed something of an aversion to; phrases whose use has come to make me do an immediate mental wince & start to re-evaluate my opinion of the author.

Continuing on my lists of books for 2016 and 2017, here are the books I read in 2018, presented in ascending order of completion date.

I saw a post about Prolog recently, wherein the author used Prolog to solve a Clue-style problem.

What are DCGs?

I’ve been thinking for a while that I’d like to switch my blog away from Jekyll & to something Org-mode based.

When I switched from neovim back to Emacs a year or two ago, something that my muscle-memory missed were the key bindings I had for denite.nvim for opening files & buffers in splits – C-s to open the result in a horizontal split and C-v for a vertical spl…

I just finished reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and had kind of mixed feelings about it.

A quick little Emacs thing I figured out that I wasn’t able to find from searching, so I thought I’d document it here: I use the great PragmataPro font for Emacs editor.

A few weeks ago, I had a modest goal, which kind of spiralled out of control and ended up with a PR to SWI-Prolog and my most ambitious Prolog library yet.

I’m continuing to work on the cryptopals challenges and it remains very fun.

Warning: Minor spoilers for Cryptopals challenge 23 here.

Perhaps the most challenging part of running a remote business is communication.

I’ve been playing around with learning Prolog for the past few weeks and have been really, really enjoying it.

When teaching programming, something that tends to come up a lot is when and how values can change.

A few months ago, I saw this great article about teaching programming with examples that deal with real issues (which I highly recommend reading).

Like last year, I tried to keep track of all the books I read.

Recently, I’ve been working on writing another Braid bot, in Racket this time.

The Problem Things started when I finally finished up our Gmail integration bot for Braid.

I had a bit of a vexing experience with Elixir the other day that I thought I’d document here.

Something that the last few years of building things with Lean Pixel and then Bloom has really reinforced in me is a belief in the power of small teams.

It’s been one week now since my Keyboardio Model01 arrived!

For the leadup to the arrival, see the series starting here My Keyboardio Model 01 arrived today and I’m using it to write this very post!

Part four of an n-part series.

Part three of an n-part series.

Part two of an n-part series.

Part one of an n-part series.

I had a chat today with a friend that I hadn’t seen in almost sixteen years.

So here’s a weird story.

Something that I started thinking about more recently, inspired by Bodil & others, is the difference between Free Software and Open-Source Software.

Most of the work I’ve been doing the last few years has been in Clojure.

Braid, the new type of chat client that we’ve been building uses the Datomic database for storage.

I started making a concerted effort to always have at least one book in progress this year.

For most of my life, I’ve identified as someone that can’t draw.

Kakoune is an interesting new (to me, at least) text editor that aims at improving on vim’s efficiency of text editing.

I first heard about the Io programming language quite a while ago – I believe I saw it in Steve Yegge’s1 sidebar when I was still in high school and just starting to get interested in different programming languages.

A big part of my life since about 2010 has been strength training.

How we teach programming is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately.

Introduction There is a theory from the well-known and, uh, interesting strength trainer Pavel Tstsouline that a very efficient way to get stronger is by a method he calls “greasing the groove”.

I recently came across this post about implementing a “reverse factorial” in Factor.

The Beginning A few years ago a bought a domain name for my sister for her birthday.