Ah, command line tools, they’re so fast. And so easy to use on a Mac. Given a bunch of image files in the same dimensions, that you want to crop to a fixed portion of the image: 1) Install imagemagick brew install imagemagick 2) put all the images in a directory by themselves, and cd … Read moreCropping a bunch of pictures to the same dimensions
Nature vs Nurture: what makes us who we are? I think we’re missing something. “Nurture” implies the past, it implies history. What about right now? Our current circumstances have a huge impact on what we believe, feel, and do. In Systems Thinking, notice that pressures on an actor, and the information available to them, affect … Read moreNature vs Nurture vs Now
At my very first programming job, I learned a distinction between two kinds of data: Reference and Application. Application data is produced by the application, consumed and modified by the software. It is customers, orders, events, inventory. It changes and grows all the time. Typically a new deployment of the app starts with no application … Read moreApplication vs. Reference Data
After moving from Scala to Clojure, I miss the types. Lately I’ve been playing with Prismatic Schema, a sort of optional typing mechanism for Clojure. It has some surprising benefits, even over Scala’s typing sometimes. I plan some posts about interesting ones of those, but first a more ordinary use of types: locating errors. Today … Read moreFun with Optional Typing: narrowing errors
My coworker Tom finds Ruby unreadable. What?? I’m thinking. Ruby can be quite expressive, even beautiful. But Tom can’t be sure what Ruby is going to do. Some imported code could be modifying methods on built-in classes. You can never be sure exactly what will happen when this Ruby code executes. He’s right about that. … Read moreReadable, or reason-aboutable?
It’s time to clean out some old branches from the team’s git repository. In memory of them, I record useful tricks here. First, Sharon’s post talks about finding branches that are ripe for deletion, by detecting branches already merged. This post covers those, plus how to find out more about the others. This post is … Read moreSpring cleaning of git branches
Right now at work I’m suffering from a QA environment that has been around too long. It runs out of space sometimes, rabbit gets hiccupy. Elasticsearch mappings are bad; we’ve updated the creation scripts, but these boxes have been provisioned since before then. If we regularly discarded our QA environments and spun up new ones, … Read moreSpecial Snowflakes
Systems (and by “systems” I mean “everything”) can be modeled as stocks and flows.[1] Stocks are quantities that accumulate (or disappear) over time, like money in a bank account or code in your repository. They may not be physical, but they are observable in some sense. Flows are how the stock is filled, and how … Read moreSystems Thinking about WIT