R.T. Lechow

Ruby DCamp 2013

2013-09-26T00:00:00-04:00

2013 marks my second Ruby DCamp, an annual Ruby-ish unconference. Located in Prince William Forest National Park, Viriginia, it literally takes place at a cabin in the woods.

Leslie Spit sends me off.

During the day, 80 curated participants gather to do Rubby at the central lodge.

We cook together.

We code together.

We game together.

And we programme the conference together.

At night we crash in these sleeper cabins.

It’s probably the most fun you can have while still actually learning.

Kevin Mitnick's Business Card

2013-04-29T00:00:00-04:00

A Test-Driven FizzBuzz Test

2012-11-16T00:00:00-05:00

Joey deVilla is testing interview candidates with FizzBuzz:

I asked each candidate to do the exercise in the programming language of their choice, with pen and paper rather than on a computer. By requiring them to use pen and paper rather than letting them use a computer, I prevented them from simply Googling a solution. It would also force them to actually think about the solution rather than simply go through the “type in some code / run it and see what happens / type in some more code” cycle.

Commenters are expressing violent disagreement, violent agreement, and violent alternative implementations in everything from Perl to Racket.

One thing missing from the discussion was a worked example. To fill the gap, here’s a video of me driving FizzBuzz with tests:

Some thoughts:

Tests “force you to think about the solution”, without googling, and without pen & paper.
You see the algorithm built in small steps. When you take big steps, it’s easy to get lost. When you take small steps, errors are small and easy to find. Being able to take small steps is a useful skill. Demonstrating that skill with pen & paper in about 3 minutes seems… tricky.
These are my tools at work. This is much closer to how I solve other problems. A formal, repeatable feedback loop helps thinking through the problem.

2011 Global Day Of Coderetreat Toronto

2011-12-03T00:00:00-05:00

December 3rd was the first Global Day of Coderetreat. Over 2200 developers in 90 cities participated. Back in November, while planning a trip to Chicago for SCNA, Corey confirmed that nobody was facilitating in Toronto. This city has a really active software scene, so I figured I’d give it a shot. Here’s the result:

It couldn’t have happened without help:

Thanks to my fellow Coderetreaters. Practicing your craft at 8:30am? On a Saturday? Many commuting over an hour? That’s just baller.
Thanks to my employer, Learnhub, for the office and license to cause mayhem with furniture.
Thanks to Jay de Dios at Hireglyphics for sponsoring lunch, and moreso, helping build community.
Thanks to Cinquecento Trattoria for cooking delicious lasagna and tiramisù (as you do).

We had 18 Coderetreaters, who roughly broke up into one-third Rubyists, one-third Java, and one-third .NET. Python, Clojure, Javascript, and Gosu made appearances too.

Our sessions looked like this:

Intro to the Game of Life. For some, this Coderetreat was a first. Plus it’s good to warm-up before the coffee kicks in.
Kent Beck’s Four Rules of Simple Design. There are various formulations, but I prefer the minimal:
- Tests pass.
- Reveals intent.
- No duplication.
- Small code.
Choose Your Own Adventure. Pairs picked one or more constraints from a list. Popular choices included no conditionals, no iteration, methods under 2/5 lines, “Tell, Don’t Ask”, and no objects.
Evil Mute Ping Pong. “Mute” because talking is prohibited. “Evil” because Implementors can use whatever loopholes they find to make the tests pass.
Make It Work. Write the worst code you can. Give it your best shot. A good way to wind down.

The final retrospective offered a variety of thoughts, with a couple common themes: [re]discovering TDD, getting to know both new and familiar languages, and thinking about the social aspects of our craft.

Srdjan and Martin plotting. Loaned my ARxTA/Github-stickered laptop. Pretty sure they tried breaking Ruby. Gonna have to check on that.

Damon and Marcus in Deep Pairing Mode.

Dan tells me he had a great time retreating into deliberate practice. Owen was happy to spend some time with Ruby sans Rails.

Tim laughs at the code while Taz… gestures at the code. That’ll teach it.

Mark and Roxanne also in Deep Pairing Mode.

Anna and Austin did unspeakable things with nested hashes. But hey, there’s a Clean Code guarantee.

Kyle firing eye lazors at the code while Chris drives.

Yehoram concentrates despite James utterly smashing the fourth wall!

Jenna Morrison Critical Mass

2011-11-14T00:00:00-05:00

Jenna Morrison was killed while on her bike by the driver of a five-tonne cube truck one week ago. This morning, we had a Critical Mass to deliver her ghost bike:

256 Colors in Vim, inside Screen, in an iTerm, on OS X Leopard

2008-12-15T00:00:00-05:00

Borrowing a lot from this sage advice, I decided it’s time to figure out 256 color vim on OS X. That meant immediately leaving Terminal.app for dead, since he can’t display more than 8 (16 w/ANSI bold) colors. Here’s the alternative I came up with:

Installed iTerm.
In iTerm, hit option+cmd+B for “Profiles”.
- Under “Keyboard Profiles, Global”, I removed all the mappings and set the “Option Key as” to “+Esc”. This allows me to switch channels in irssi with option+number.
- Under “Terminal Profiles, Default”, I changed “Type” to “xterm-256color” and checked “Blinking cursor”.
- Under “Display Profiles”, for “Dark Background” and “Light Background”, I tweaked the “Cursor” colors to be more visible.
Grabbed this perl script that prints a 256 color test palette to the console. Ran it outside of GNU Screen, and everything looked good.
Added the following lines to my ~/.screenrc:

#terminfo and termcap for nice 256 color terminal
# allow bold colors - necessary for some reason
attrcolor b “.I”
# tell screen how to set colors. AB = background, AF=foreground
# the first two are for other terminal emulators, just in case.
termcapinfo xterm “Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm”
termcapinfo xterm-color “Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm”
termcapinfo xterm-256color “Co#256:AB=E[48;5;%dm:AF=E[38;5;%dm”
term xterm-256color
# erase background with current bg color
defbce “on”
Ran the test script inside of GNU Screen, everything looked good.
Added the following lines to the top of my ~/.vimrc, because apparently “set t_Co=256” must appear before any syntax and color settings:

set t_Co=256
:colorscheme railscasts
Started up vim inside GNU Screen, and voila!
Wrote about it here so I never forget this stuff.