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I recently migrated my dotfiles from rcm to GNU Stow.

I had to URI-encode the components of a URL in node the other day.

GitHub’s enshittification has gotten entirely out of hand.

I see a lot of this-setup or setup-that GitHub actions around.

Semigroups are, quite possibly, my favorite part of Haskell.

Test coverage is a tricky topic.

This may be obvious or well-known to some, but I discovered the other day that you can make a MonadReader env instance for any MonadState env m trivially.

I love concrete examples that illustrate the day-to-day of the professional Haskell programmer, and show the inspiration for that entirely-untrue quip, “if it compiles, it works”.

Some may say that you shouldn’t write shell beyond a certain, very low bar of complexity.

For as long as I’ve built Docker images on CI, I’ve fought the layer caching problem.

I maintain an Auth plugin for authenticating with Google OAuth2 in a Yesod application.

The following are all the things I want in place for a Haskell project.

In a recent effort to keep my latest laptop more standard and less customized, I’ve been experimenting with XTerm over my usual choice of rxvt-unicode.

Deleting Git tags that have already been pushed to your remote is something I have to google literally every time I do it; why the invocation is so arcane, I don’t know.

A while back, I launched a side project called tee-io.

While reading Understanding Computation again last night, I was going back through the chapter where Tom Stuart describes deterministic and non-deterministic finite automata.

Every time I read Learn You a Haskell, I get something new out of it.

Lately at work, I’ve been fortunate enough to work on a JSON API which I was given the freedom to write in Yesod.

In lecture 5A of Structure & Interpretation of Computer Programs, Gerald Sussman introduces the idea of assignments, side effects and state.

Hspec is a BDD library for writing Rspec-style tests in Haskell.

In my continuing efforts to strip my computing experience of any non-essential parts, I’ve decided to ditch my statusbars.

For almost 7 years, now I’ve had a desktop at home, running, serving (among many things) my personal blog.

Have you ever wanted to mock a program on your system so you could write fast and reliable tests around a shell script which calls it?

The recent hullabaloo with Snowden and the NSA is very scary.

What if we wanted to write a Haskell program to behave something like this: $ runhaskell hello.hs Hello who?

For the longest time, my interaction with music was via MPD.

A while back, I made a post about deploying yesod apps to heroku.

Recently, Yesod released version 1.2.

I hear and see a lot of passing complaints about dealing with a large amount of mail.

If you’re like me and absolutely abhor the Caps Lock key, you’ve probably figured out some way to replace it with a more suitable function.

Aurget was one of the first programs I ever wrote.

I’ve heard rumors that a Google Chromebook can make a surprisingly sweet machine for a developer.

Once I start my new job at thoughtbot, I’ll be working on a variety of ruby and rails projects at the same time.

Recently, while watching Corey Haines and Aaron Patterson pair-program, I heard Mr.

A lot of smarter people than I have come up with the idea that moving your business logic out of framework based classes and into Plain Old Ruby Objects (POROs) is a Good Thing.

BIG FAT WARNING One thing to note, and the reason why I’m no longer using this setup: screen sessions started from within X cannot survive X restarts.

If you work on a project that’s been around for a while, chances are it might still be using SVN for version control.

for each desired change, make the change easy (warning: this may be hard), then make the easy change — Kent Beck, September 25, 2012 Here’s some code from our main application helper.

My latest bash-to-ruby rewrite was dvdcopy to dvd2iso.

The following was written for [issue 7][issue] of Web & PHP magazine.

Ruby’s open classes are great for adding behavior to existing objects.

Fake S3 is a gem designed to run a small server on localhost that will correctly handle AWS/S3 GETs and PUTs (among others) while using the local filesystem as the storage backend.

Update This post describes compiling a Yesod application locally using a VM to achieve the compilation on a Heroku-like machine, then pushing the binary up to Heroku to be run.

Regardless of what editor you choose or how deeply you decide to extend or configure it, the most important thing for a professional programmer regarding her tool set is awareness.

I’m a big fan of Avdi Grimm’s thoughts about writing confident ruby.

Despite the enormous increase in popularity lately, it seems some people still don’t know about this project or how it can improve your development work-flow.

tl;dr: it’s just like aurget but more stable and faster Developing aurget was getting cumbersome.

If you write console based applications in ruby, chances are you’re going to want to get some test coverage on that eventually.

Keter is Michael Snoyman’s answer to the Yesod deployment “problem”.

Sometimes it’s fun to do something completely useless.