A wonderfully thoughtful and thought-provoking article about the growing culture war in the UK, as we slowly circle the drain. #
Recent posts
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Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers
A useful name for an intuitive fallacy. #
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How to Make A Memex
I discovered this after writing up my post about Roam Research and, inevitably, it says much of what I wanted to say more effectively than I was able to say it. #
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How a cabal of romance writers cashed in on Amazon Kindle Unlimited
It turns out the world of self-published, Kindle Unlimited romance novels is cuthroat and scammy. Algorithm-gaming, fake readers, fake content, all generating millions in revenue. Kindle Unlimited is particularly susceptible because of the way it calculates and shares revenue. #
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A fortnight with Roam Research
I’ve been using Roam Research for a couple of a weeks now, and I have some thoughts about it.
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The Evolution of Socio-Technical Systems
A fabulous paper from the early 1980s. Taking examples from coal-mining, it explains the interactions between people and technology and the evolution and emergence of productive relationships between the two. There are so many lessons here for modern technical teams. #
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Ruby’s $_ variable
Ruby has many cryptic variables, but one of them is particularly useful – especially if you’re processing text from the command line.
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Mini Munging, Brighton Ruby conference, July 2015
The slides and summary from my talk at Brighton Ruby 2015.
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Command-line purging of Varnish caches
Varnish, the HTTP proxy, is a fantastic tool. Here’s a way to purge cached pages from the command line, a task I find myself wanting to do frequently.
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A Caching Analogy
Explaining caching is hard; here’s an attempt.
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Ruby regular expressions: the /o modifier
An explanation of the little-used – but handy-to-know – o modifier to Ruby’s regular expressions.
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Real progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part two in a series, this time showing how to display real progress to users.
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Faking progress in long-running command-line scripts
Sometimes, you write Ruby scripts that take a long time to execute. Here’s how to show progress to your scripts’ users – part one in a series, this time dealing with how to show indeterminate, faked progress to reassure users that something is happening.
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Persisting data in Ruby with PStore
Ruby comes with a powerful persistent storage system that’s backed by flat files and handles concurrent access and transactions out of the box – stuff you’d expect to need a database for. It’s criminally underused, and it’s called PStore. Never roll your own file locking code again!
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Paths aren't strings
If you find yourself passing around lots of file paths in your Ruby scripts, you should save yourself a headache and use Pathnames, not strings.
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Nokogiri as a command-line tool
Most Rubyists are familiar with [Nokogiri][]. It’s a combination XML and HTML parsing tool most commonly used for “screen scraping”: that is, fetching a web page, and searching through it to extract information of interest. When a website you’re interested in doesn’t offer an API, it’s often the only way to extract information from it.
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Publishing tech books with LeanPub
My experience writing a book using the fledgling publishing platform LeanPub.
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Decoding "Almost Sinatra"
In 2010, Konstantin Haase wrote a golfed version of Sinatra that was just 999 bytes long. What can it teach us about both Sinatra and Ruby?
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ARGF in Ruby
Ruby has a construct, inherited from Perl, that makes it easy to write scripts that work with input from both files and standard input. It’s called ARGF, and here’s how to use it.
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Ruby's -e, -n and -p switches
Ruby inherits lots of goodness from Perl. One of those things is the ability to invoke it in one-liners from the command line, and when you do so there are three switches that come in handy. Here’s how to use them.
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Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part III
The final article in a series on accessing WordPress data from within Ruby scripts, using ruby-wpdb.
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Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part II
More examples of ways to use ruby-wpdb to access WordPress data from within Ruby scripts.
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Accessing WordPress from Ruby: Part I
An introduction to ruby-wpdb, and how to use it to access WordPress data from Ruby.
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Clarifying lambdas
Blocks in Ruby are great. But sometimes, using named lambdas can be intention-revealing in a useful way. Here’s how.
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An introduction to HTTP verbs
HTTP runs on verbs. Here’s what each of them mean – useful if you’re creating a REST interface.