What if you could embed Ruby on a web page, using ruby.wasm without needing to install anything locally? And what if you could use Shoes – via Scarpe – to do it?
And what if you didn’t need a dev environment or anything. Just copy the HTML file to any server you want, and it works?
I get asked about computer programmer portfolios. And the job hunt generally, but often that means talking about portfolios. I’m happy to give advice to whoever will listen.
Should you have a portfolio? How do I put together a portfolio? What would go into it?
Awhile back I wrote The Forty-Year Programmer. You can think of it as my declaration of programming as art, not business. It’s about taking your time and getting good gradually over many years, which works great for art, but often badly for your career.
Today I want to talk about the differences between programming-as-art and programming-as-business.
Caitlin Quinn recently started learning programming, via The Odin Project, to help her communication with software developers on her projects. She and I talk about what The Odin Project does well, what you’ll need to do for yourself, how you can tell if you’re doing it right and more.
I’m continuing my blog posts on Mechanicsburg, in the Girl Genius webcomic.
It will probably make more sense if you start from the beginning.
It’s really obvious from some of the comics that the authors have a strong idea of Mechanicsburg’s geography. They probably have fun sketchy maps that they...
My family and I have started playing
GURPS Girl Genius
and I’m running a campaign that starts when Agatha is around 5
— about 13 years before Book 1 starts. I’ve been
reconstructing some combination of the modern and 15-years-earlier
setting from the
Girl Genius Wiki,
the comic and various other sources...
I have a pretty regimented routine of powdered caffeine usage. A lovely fellow I know asked me about it recently. Occasionally people do. And I thought, I should just tell everybody.
To do that, I’ll first have to summarise something that was once online and I can’t find these days: agonistic versus antagonistic usage of stimulants. It’s simpler than it sounds.
And I’ll describe the eight-week cycle I’m on to manage my tolerance. Caffeine is an addictive drug that builds high tolerance. Most people ignore that, build their tolerance and then don’t get much benefit from it afterward. That problem can be fixed.
In the age of using internet sites for important things – social media, say, or banking – the Internet has grown status pages, to let companies know whether a particular service is currently working.
Companies have always had internal status pages. But these days most have external status pages, so non-employees can tell whether the site is working. First people outside the company started doing that, and then companies realised they couldn’t avoid it happening, so better to provide status pages for themselves.
Why is it so bad for somebody else to provide your status page? What’s different about a company’s official status page?
As I write this there’s an ugly Discord outage which is barely acknowledged on their status page, so it’s a great time for me to talk about that.
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Why this specific newsletter? You want to be an expert. Expertise comes from learning the fundamentals, deeply. And that comes from the best kind of practice.
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