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I had an exit interview at my old employer. It started with a question from a HR person about what I liked and – maybe, even – disliked about the company. After that, it consisted mainly of me telling the HR person “what I really disliked was X”, and the HR person responding that without…

Playing with NoFlo a bit, currently. It’s a flow-based programming environment in JavaScript. It might not be apparent from this post but I do quite like it. Data-flow programming is probably not much of an improvement if you start with a sane language. But since JavaScript is a rotten piece of shit all the way…

It’s hard to argue against TDD because that is often construed as arguing against software testing itself. I guess there are actually people who think that all testing is bollocks, but I am not one of them. I think that there’s value in regression and acceptance testing. Yet I still think that TDD is absolutely…

Gherkin is a hack. Gherkin is the “language” (I’ll justify the use of scare-quotes in a minute) used by the Cucumber test framework. Or, if you’re using PHP, the language behind the PHP port behat. Tests usually look something like this (example lifted straight from cucumber’s docs): Which is very nice. Having tests that are…

So I looked at ownCloud this week. The install was pretty much hassle-free, as you would expect from a PHP application. And the web frontend is pretty nice (though extremely slow, at least on my AMD Sempron server). There’s a photo gallery, and direct media streaming, and zip downloads, and generally a lot of good…

Racket Appreciation Day was today, for me. I tried writing a small script that reads from Github’s API and displays a list of “@mentions” in Guile. (Why Guile? Well, the short version of the story is that I’d like to run this program on my [Ben NanoNote](http://en.qi-hardware.com/wiki/Ben_NanoNote) since I have that machine lying around for…

Playing with node.js currently, and I don’t grok it. I’m passable (not “good”, just passable) in JavaScript but I don’t get why anyone would ever want to program in the style node.js dictates. It’s async, yeah. Only async. And async without language-level promises, or channels, or a select. Or multi-processing. Or anything really. They basically…

Here’s a small raycaster in CoffeeScript. I wrote that just to see how it would look. (There’s also a small rant at the end, if that’s what you’re looking for.) Result (click through from your RSS reader if you can’t see a canvas): Not bad, certainly more succinct than JavaScript, but …well – maybe I’ve…

Just some short notes about CoffeeScript, after maybe 5 hours of playing with it. This is mostly about the syntax – but then again, CoffeeScript is mostly about the syntax. I like it, overall, it’s definitely a step up from JavaScript. Though it is a bit of a “works 90% of the time” design: it…