Latest posts
Working with Intervals
Over the last couple of months my team at Flytrex had occasion to use intervals more than once, and in both cases the team asked me, “What’s the right way to solve this?”. Since this is a common problem, I thought I’d write a short post about it. Most interval problems seem deceptively simple, while…
How we deploy with Git
It seems common practice to have a staging and production branches for deploying your code. A common pattern is to push (or pull request) to these branches, then merge the changes. Then, some system watching this branch will notice, and deploy to the appropriate environment. (Another way this is done is with tags, but I…
5 useful lessons from writing an app for kids
It always starts with an itch. Today, there aren’t really many good apps to teach kids to read Hebrew. The best one is “Kesem’s Monsters” – and when I tried getting my son to play it, it annoyed me. He liked playing it – but I thought it wasn’t teaching reading all that well. About…
Favourites
Rhyme and Reason with Python
After reading xkcd’s blog, I went to LimerickDB.com. It looks and works just like bash.org, but for limericks. Quite amused with some of the limericks available, I wanted to try and compose my own. The first one came out fine, but I got stuck without a rhyme for the second one: a man named guido…
Manually fuzzing my own compiler
As I mentioned before, I had to write a compiler for simplified CPL. An obvious requirement was that the compiler generate correct code. A less obvious requirement, but important none-the-less, was that after a syntax error, the compiler will keep parsing the source program. Now, the default behavior of a parser generated by Bison for…
Fractals in 10 minutes no. 3 – The Dragon
When first I looked through the pages of the book “Hacker’s Delight”, I found myself looking at the chapter about bases. There I learned a very curious fact – with the digits of 0,1 and the base of -2, you can represent any integer. Right afterwards I learned something even more interesting – with the…
Fractals in 10 minutes No. 2 – Recursive Spring
Imagine a straight wire. Bend this wire until its ends meet. You get a ring. Next stage. Take another straight wire, bend it as before, but this time, don’t let the ends meet, instead continue bending the wire more and more, until you get a spring. Now, Think of this spring as the first wire,…
Python module usage statistics – Cont.
Well, very embarrassingly for me, turns out I had a bug in my original post and code. As per Doug’s suggestion, I tried running the script I wrote on the standard library, and got results I didn’t quite believe. So I checked them, opened socket.py, and there was an “import _socket”. However module “_socket” was…
Python module usage statistics
IMPORTANT UPDATE: The code I used to create these statistics had some bugs. The fixed statistics are available here. After reading Doug Hellman’s post about python stdlib modules he needs the documentation to, I commented there that I need the documentation for logging because I don’t use it too frequently. Later, I thought a little…
Projects
How we deploy with Git
It seems common practice to have a staging and production branches for deploying your code. A common pattern is to push (or pull request) to these branches, then merge the changes. Then, some system watching this branch will notice, and deploy to the appropriate environment. (Another way this is done is with tags, but I…
5 useful lessons from writing an app for kids
It always starts with an itch. Today, there aren’t really many good apps to teach kids to read Hebrew. The best one is “Kesem’s Monsters” – and when I tried getting my son to play it, it annoyed me. He liked playing it – but I thought it wasn’t teaching reading all that well. About…
How to hire a freelancer – 25 useful tips
Over the years I’ve had many opportunities to work with freelancers. Recently a friend had a bad experience looking for freelancers, and I tried to help her find new ones. That prompted me to write a bit about my method. While not completely foolproof, it will increase your chances of finding better freelancers. Defining the…
Programming
Working with Intervals
Over the last couple of months my team at Flytrex had occasion to use intervals more than once, and in both cases the team asked me, “What’s the right way to solve this?”. Since this is a common problem, I thought I’d write a short post about it. Most interval problems seem deceptively simple, while…
5 Tips for more effective logging
Logging is a critical part of every serious project. If logging is not important in your project – you’re probably doing logging wrong. Here are a few lessons I learned over the years running multiple projects. 1 – Reserve ERROR for errors, and everything that is not a bug in your code shouldn’t be an…
QA by Child
I recently published a home project I was working on, an app to teach children to read Hebrew. I wrote it originally to help my son learn to read Hebrew. In an early version my son was very excited to play it. He quickly understood the principle – see a word, then tap one of…
LearnLang – a small chrome extension for learning the German cases
I’ve been learning German for quite some time now. Some months ago, it came to the point where I was stuck – in order to progress I had to learn the German cases by heart. It’s not a lot of data, and being able to understand it is relatively straightforward, however knowing it actively as…
Read more LearnLang – a small chrome extension for learning the German cases
Writing a pandemic simulation
Over the last weekend I felt like programming something fun and easy, so I thought, why not write yet another pandemic/epidemic simulation. So between helping a crying child and preparing lunch, I created simpandemic. It’s small, simplistic, but easy to play with and change parameters. As a toy project, it’s far from perfect. I implemented…
How I learned to stop worrying and actually use StackOverflow
So apparently almost all of the developers in the world are using stackoverflow. However many developers just use StackOverflow to lookup answers, and rarely to ask their own questions. Answering other people’s questions is of course rarer still. Up until recently I was the same: I wrote a few questions in StackOverflow, and even answered…
Read more How I learned to stop worrying and actually use StackOverflow