Tag: programming

  • Making Tuff improvements

    My approach to building Tuff, my static site generator that I began working on last November, was to jump in as quickly as possible by publishing my personal website publicly very early in the development process. Doing so forced me to make rapid improvements and to focus on the most important features. By spending 5am…

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  • How I’m using ChatGPT as an accelerator

    Over the last few weeks I’ve begun using the recent crop of AI-powered services in my daily work and I’ve found them to be an enormous boost to my productivity and fun to play with. I do not know if these human-like chat services will end up causing great harm to the earth’s population or…

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  • Building Tuff – A static site generator just for me

    Just about a month ago, for some unknown and undoubtedly a sleep deprived reason, I began building my own static site generator (SSG). And I did it entirely wrong. This is that story. A sensible person would have first looked at the available static site generators and tried them first. I didn’t. In fact, I…

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  • What is a script? What is a program?

    Chris Coyier: I don’t think there is any computer science concept that distinguishes the terms scripts, templates, and programs in any real sense. Like Chris, I too find it difficult to put place some of my coding projects into a category. I write a lot of code to run on the command line. Some of…

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  • Julia Evans on tiny personal programs

    Julia Evans: So here are a few examples of small personal programming projects I’ve done. I’m not going to talk about “learning projects” where my goal was to learn something specific because I’ve already written a billion blog posts about that. I’ve written countless tidbits of code to solve personal problems. Some of them end…

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  • Top 3 reasons to transfer Stripe subscriptions from one account to another

    After transferring tens of thousands of subscriptions in my side gig, StripeTransfer.com – which is a service that helps individuals and businesses transfer their Stripe subscriptions from one Stripe account to another – I’ve come across three main reasons this service is needed. While there have been other reasons I’ve been asked to migrate or…

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  • Micro.blog open sources iOS and Mac apps

    Manton Reece: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the longevity of Micro.blog and where we need help to continue to grow the platform and community. As we approach 4 years since the public launch, there are some parts of the platform and supporting services that should be shared more widely, so that I’m not…

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  • Introducing the Micro.blog Posting Bookmarklet

    Recently there was a discussion on Micro.blog about having a bookmarklet that made it simple to post a link to a page you were viewing. And while there are solutions and workarounds, I didn’t see that there was a standard bookmarklet to do this. So now there is. The Micro.blog Posting Bookmarklet does two simple…

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  • thiscodeWorks.com

    Over the weekend I was reading an interview with Patrick Collison of Stripe (who had a big weekend) and he linked to this YouTube video interview with Mishka Orakzai the founder of thiscodeWorks.com. She describes it as the Pinterest of Code. It works really well and seems super useful. She has created extensions for Chrome…

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  • Using Docker to build a WordPress theme

    If you have no idea what Docker is or how it works, this blog post won’t help you too much. For that, I recommend Julia Evans’ Zine How Containers Work! I recently wanted to build a premium WordPress theme to offer here via my website. I started, finished, and released the theme in record time…

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  • I’m releasing some code projects

    When I first started hacking away at a computer (sometime just after the first Jurassic Park film was released in theaters), and ultimately hacking away on the web, people would release small projects for others to use. Single-use scripts, small applications, design files for a specific niche, and proofs-of-concept that you could download and use…

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  • Learning SwiftUI is tough because it is still early days

    Back in early October I quipped that I was opening Xcode to start a new project. I have no qualms in telling you that the project was going to be a Mac app for Unmark. I was going to build the app for a variety of reasons but the main one was to learn SwiftUI.…

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  • Do you use the Web Share API?

    If you use the Web Share API, Jeremy Keith is looking for more feedback. I’m not expecting anything to happen anytime soon, but it would be really good to gather as much data as possible around existing usage of the Web Share API. If you’re using it, or you know anyone who’s using it, please,…

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  • PHP turns 25

    PHP turns 25. I’ve said that I agree that PHP is pretty bad. However, I still use it regularly, it has allowed me to make some incredible things, and made me a ton of money over those 25 years. /via Michael Tsai.

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  • React is an ecosystem

    Jonathan Snook, on his learning curve when joining a new organization that uses React: When people talk about learning React, I think that React, in and of itself, is relatively easy to understand. At least, I felt it was. I have components. I have JSX. I hit some hiccups with required keys or making sure…

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  • The Swift Era begins

    Brent Simmons: Though I don’t discount Catalyst’s usefulness — we will get lots of apps new to the Mac — the real news this week was about SwiftUI and the Combine framework. This, finally, is a new way of writing apps, and it’s based on Swift and not on Objective-C. It’s very much not from NeXT.…

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  • Xamarin videos, now on YouTube

    Me, 17-minutes into an audio bit in 2017 (paraphrasing): If you go onto YouTube search for a problem you’re having for Xcode and Swift you’ll find 15 well-produced videos to solve your problem. […] But you won’t find 15 well-produced videos with Visual Studio + C# (or Xamarin). For the last few years I’ve thought…

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  • Boring is good in software development

    I use the term “boring” here to describe that which isn’t brand new. Sometimes we’re only excited about the new. The new car! The new house! Rather than being content with what we have, because it works or is paid off or we’re familiar with every nook and cranny, we sometimes can get wrapped up…

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  • Testing inconsistent Web Share Target API data with a Progressive Web App

    One of the latest things I’ve been working on for Unmark is turning the app into a Progressive Web App (PWA). Among other benefits, this affords Unmark the capability of being a “Web Share Target” on Android. (Sadly, only Android for now) A Web Share Target is very similar to a feature you likely use…

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  • Xamarin.Forms 3.1

    David Ortinau on the Xamarin Blog: Earlier this year, we surveyed Xamarin.Forms developers about the kinds of custom controls and extra platform code being written repeatedly that should be considered for support “in the box”. From these conversations, we created an initiative to deliver as many as we could in the next several releases. Just…

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  • Microsoft Office now shares a common codebase

    Erik Schwiebert: Mac Office 2016 version 16 is now live! For the first time in over 20 years, Office is again built out of one codebase for all platforms (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android)! MSFT is dog fooding big time with this latest release of Mac Office. I’ve been enjoying my work within their frameworks and…

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  • Choosing without deciding

    Seth Godin: We can save a lot of time and effort by making our meaningless choices effortless. Pick the first one, or the one in alphabetical order or flip a coin. Merely have a rule and make the choice. This point made by a recent post by the inimitable Seth Godin strikes the same chord…

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  • Developers, Let me tell you about Microsoft (audio)

    I’ve been writing about Microsoft’s moves for the last three years. This week everything has come together and I’ve been writing my first multi-platform application using C# and Visual Studio. In this long rant I go on and on about how Microsoft needs to spread the word about what they are up to. Links for…

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  • Firefox Quantum Developer Edition

    Julian Descottes, for Mozilla Hacks: Firefox 57 Developer Edition was just released! It’s such an advance that we’ve given this browser a new name: Firefox Quantum. I’ve been using Firefox as my default web browser on the Mac, iPad, and iPhone for a little over a week. I’ve also been using Developer Edition for most…

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  • John George shares a solution

    John George, fellow NEPA.js attendee: I’m writing this because I discovered the hard way that .NET Core’s ‘dotnet run’ command is NOT meant to be production ready. My biggest headache was that my website shut down when I exited my shell. Not even the ‘disown’command would dissociate the running service from the user. Posts like this…

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  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

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  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

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  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

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  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

    Continue >

  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

    Continue >

  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

    Continue >

  • Brad Frost on \”full-stack developers\”

    Brad Frost: The term “full-stack developer” implies that a developer is equally adept at both frontend code and backend code, but I’ve never in my personal experience witnessed anyone who truly fits that description. In many of the descriptions I’ve seen it goes even further than that. Sometimes full-stack developer refers to someone who can also…

    Continue >

  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

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  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

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  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

    Continue >

  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

    Continue >

  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

    Continue >

  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

    Continue >

  • Tom Dale: \”Compilers are the new frameworks\”

    Tom Dale, Senior Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn and co-creator of Ember.js, in a post where he argues that compilers are the new web frameworks: Native code tends to have the luxury of not really caring about file size—a small 40MB iOS app would get you laughed out of the room on the web. And…

    Continue >

  • Python is blowing up

    David Robinson, not The Admiral, for Stack Overflow: We recently explored how wealthy countries (those defined as high-income by the World Bank) tend to visit a different set of technologies than the rest of the world. Among the largest differences we saw was in the programming language Python. When we focus on high-income countries, the…

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  • A unique color for every address in the world

    A recent, yet-to-be-announced client project had me designing a mobile app interface that dealt a lot with showing locations and events that are happening at certain locations (how is that for vague? sorry). While I utilized the brand’s colors to represent certain sections of the app I wanted the app to have tons of colors…

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  • I can work on anything I want

    One of the most enjoyable aspects of working on your own project is that there is so much to do. That may seem strange, why would I want to have so much to do? But if you look at it a different way it becomes a much more enjoyable experience. Whenever I sit down to…

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  • Observations on building my first iOS app in Swift

    In early June I decided I wanted to learn iOS app development using Swift. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last month, building two apps that I can use on my own phone, and one app that I’m now in beta testing via TestFlight with a few friends. Over the last month I’ve…

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  • Arguments aren’t parameters

    Eevee on the names of things in programming languages: Part of the problem here is that we’re not actually doing computer science. We’re doing programming, with a wide variety (hundreds!) of imperfect languages with different combinations of features and restrictions. There are only so many words to go around, so the same names get used…

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  • Attending the Wilkes-Barre Programming meetup

    On Saturday I braved the frigid temperatures and attended a Wilkes-Barre Programming meetup at the Osterhout Free Library in downtown Wilkes-Barre. I arrived a few minutes late – it was Saturday so of course I had to make myself some breakfast, enjoy my coffee, watch a little YouTube prior to getting out in the elements…

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  • Hacking rather than waiting

    Yesterday afternoon Sarah Pressler retweeted Jono Young’s request for a plugin that would add a submenu to the WordPress’ Admin with the current pages for the site under the Pages menu. This would reduce the number of clicks to get to the page editor. I was waiting for an upload to finish and I thought, given the code…

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  • How can I get into programming?

    Linus Torvalds in 2004 on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): To me, the biggest thing with small patches is not necessarily the patch itself. I think that much more important than the patch is the fact that people get used to the notion that they can change the kernel – not just on an…

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  • Documentation by Stack Overflow

    Kevin Montrose of Stack Overflow explaining Documentation: Documentation is community-curated, example-focused developer documentation, based on the principles of Stack Overflow. A natural extension to Stack Overflow and a welcome one. I should likely make this my homepage.

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  • Microsoft open sources .NET Core

    Richard Lander on the .NET Blog: We are excited to announce the release of .NET Core 1.0, ASP.NET Core 1.0 and Entity Framework Core 1.0, available on Windows, OS X and Linux! .NET Core is a cross-platform, open source, and modular .NET platform for creating modern web apps, microservices, libraries and console applications. They said they would, and…

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  • Migrating Subscriptions from one Stripe account to another

    Update June 2021: I’ve had enough interest in this service that I’ve created StripeTransfer.com — Please visit this site to schedule your consultation. Learn More at StripeTransfer.com One of my recent client programming projects (hire me here) was to help a company migrate all customers, cards, plans, and subscriptions from one Stripe account to another…

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