Articles by JJ

  1. How to destroy your Python program

    Published Fri, June 6, 2014 by JJ

    I discovered today that Python’s True and False are actually constants—which means that their values can be changed. While this has been disallowed in Python 3, it still allows you to wreak some havoc in youror someone else’sPython 2 programs.

    Definitely don’t do this ...

    Tagged in: python
  2. I gave a Hacker School Seminar

    Published Tue, April 29, 2014 by JJ

    Today at Hacker School, I gave a seminar entitled “Freelance and Travel for Fun and Profit,” talking about the year I spent traveling the world while supporting myself as a freelance programmer. I’ve long been meaning to write this up as both a series of blog posts and a ...

  3. Introduction to HTML5 canvas

    Published Wed, April 2, 2014 by JJ

    In my quest to learn a bit more about front-end and responsive design, I’ve decided to do a mini-project building a Pacman map-editor in the browser. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to make it playable. This was inspired by a conversation with Mary about ...

  4. Getting syntax highlighting on Scriptogr.am (and other hosted static site generators)

    Published Wed, March 26, 2014 by JJ

    The benefits of hosted static site generators include crazy ease of use, auto-deployment, hosting, etc.—but on the downside, you’re sometimes a bit more limited in the control you have over the site.

    When starting out with trying Scriptogr.am, I was a bit disappointed by the lack of ...

  5. Some things I learned about Android

    Published Mon, March 24, 2014 by JJ

    Activity layouts: XML vs Java

    For a long while, I couldn’t really understand the difference between the XML files and the Java files. It seemed at first like the XML files determine what objects are available on the display for a particular activity, and then the actions and interactivity ...

    Tagged in: hackerschool, android, java
  6. How to use getopts inside a Bash function

    Published Tue, March 18, 2014 by JJ

    As part of my quest to finish packaging up my Bash function that gets the updated weather in your Bash prompt, I needed to better organize my code, and so started putting some code into functions. Bash, however, is a fickle language, and the difficulty that quickly arose was using ...

    Tagged in: hackerschool, bash, getopts
  7. Asynchronous programming with Arduino

    Published Tue, March 11, 2014 by JJ

    I’ve been working quite a bit this week and last week with Arduinos and Spark Cores (an Arduino-like device with WiFi and a cloud service built-in). I’ve been working on a few projects, including many out of the Arduino starter book, hooking up a remote control car to ...

    Tagged in: C, async

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