About a third of the way into Hacker School, I got myself entrenched in a rather unusual project—trying to figure out how to get an automatically updated weather icon into my Bash prompt, doing it purely in Bash for practical (and aesthetic) reasons.
I called it BashWeather.
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 ...
Fellow Hacker Schooler Amy had a great post today on mutable default arguments in Python, a very typical Python “WAT”.
(If you haven’t seen the CodeMash 2012 WAT video, you should.)
In this case, Amy wrote about how unintuitively in Python, when creating a function with default arguments, those ...
While working through Clojure for the Brave and True, I came across an explanation of Clojure’s comp function and some basic implementations of versions of comp that take only two arguments or three arguments. The tutorial challenged me to try to completely re-implement comp to accept an arbitrary number ...
As I’ve always been interested in cryptography and cybersecurity, I started working on it a bit while at Hacker School, mainly by working on the challenges in the Microcorruption capture the flag game.
Today, thanks to Filippo (also the guy behind the extremely popular and valuable Heartbleed vulnerability tester ...
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 ...
Matt at Hacker School has plans to go back home and hook up a Raspberry Pi or an Arduino to a motion sensor in order to detect when his cat jumps onto the table (which apparently happens too much)—and maybe scare him as well, making it make a loud ...
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 ...
I’m undecided on exactly where to settle on hosting my site. The main things I’m looking for are:
As of this writing, my Hacker ...
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 ...
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 ...
We had a great talk by Mel Chua not long ago about different types of learning, and how learning works at Hacker School. One of the main things she pointed out at the beginning was that learning at Hacker School is very different than the kind of directed learning that ...
This week, I decided on and started on what will be my first project for a bit, assuming everything works out:
The thought behind this is that in the US, we used to have unlimited data plans and limited voice plans, but now things have switched ...
Something I have been thinking about a fair amount but sounds ridiculous to some people is the importance of a good keyboard. The more you work at computers and type, the more it matters. I think that programmers, being more tightly intertwined with the history of computing, probably have a ...
Just going through left to right, finding the new minimum of the unsorted items, and swapping it with the left most unsorted item.
Going from left to right, and moving the leftmost unsorted item one item left at a time until we hit the beginning ...
Today, I’m working on the Princeton Algorithms Coursera Course.
Main goal overall for today and the next few days is to focus on making sure I know the basics of algorithms, enough to make up for the fact I didn’t formally study Computer Science.
I quickly skipped ...
Thanks for coming and checking out this blog! I’ll be posting about my adventures and working during Hacker School for the next few months.
The first day was great—everyone was extremely friendly, welcoming, and open.
I’m currently still deciding what I’ll be working on for the ...
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