I attended a fine meeting of Pittsburgh Code and Supply dedicated to two related topics: music and sonification. I thought it was a great idea to have presentations on both topics in the same session, thereby giving a broad view of what can be done with sound through computation.
Yesterday, Rich Hickey published a blog post, “Transducers are Coming”, which attracted a lot of attention.
I have a confession to make, which I have made before: I find it very difficult to understand ideas or code not presented with types. So I decided that the only way I could possibly understand what “transducers” are would be to actually implement them in a typed language. I ended up doing so and am sharing my findings here.
I finally attended my first ever Pittsburgh Code and Supply meeting! The group, which posts its events on Meetup, was created by local Pittsburgh software developer Justin Reese just a few months ago, in March 2014. His vision is to create a local community that, unlike conventional specific language/technology-based meetups, is much more universal and broad. If you haven’t do so already, read more about the goals of Pittsburgh Code and Supply. I’m very excited about this new group!
The Code and Supply meetup I just attended was about “Programming in journalism”. This is a topic of huge importance, and I was excited to attend to hear more about what some local journalist/programmers are doing.
I recently saw a
“guess what this does” article
on a blog I follow, and this post presents mysterious Perl code for
which the reader is asked to guess what it does:
perl -le 'print(two + two == five ? "true" : "false")'
I looked at it briefly, got a headache, and didn’t even want to solve
it. This despite using Perl as one of my main programming languages
from 1993-2010 and considering myself fairly proficient at Perl.
Feb 24, 2014 · 1 minute read · Comments OpenHackPittsburgh
Last month at OpenHack Pittsburgh, I had a rather social time.
This month, I kept entirely to myself. I didn’t even speak up to say what I was working on. I was in a somber mood, and didn’t really want to talk. I worked on a private project that I will share when I am ready.
It did feel consoling to be around other people, even while keeping to myself. Sometimes I just need to know that I am not alone.
Read On →
Jan 27, 2014 · 1 minute read · Comments OpenHackPittsburghtestingunit testingaccess control
Another month, another meeting of OpenHack Pittsburgh!
The project I worked on was writing a blog post on the controversial subject of unit testing private methods. I ended up not finishing the post, not only because there’s a lot to say, but also because I got sidetracked (in a good way) because of discussions with people while at OpenHack!
There were many good points that were made and so I had to reconsider some of my arguments.
Read On →
At long last, I have officially completed the free Coursera course “Principles of Reactive Programming”, receiving my “Statement of Accomplishment”.
This was an intense course, a lot of work, actually, and made the last two month s of my life (November and December) challenging as I juggled many activities. But it was worth the effort. I would definitely recommend this course to anyone who has completed the introductory course “Principles of Functional Programming in Scala” (or has the equivalent background). (See my review of that course as offered in fall of 2012.)
I took this course along with a bunch of local friends who are also members of the Pittsburgh Scala Meetup.
