JJinuxLand

I spend a lot of time futzing with editors and IDEs. To be honest, I'm pretty compulsive obsessive about the whole thing. I can watch YouTube videos for hours studying how each works and why people like them. One question that I really wanted to tackle is "Are there ways in which VS Code is actually better (i.e. more productive) than WebStorm, PyCharm, IntelliJ, etc."

I think this video Moving from WebStorm to VSCode does a pretty good job tackling this question, but I remain unconvinced.

I think there are three things I miss the most in VS Code compared to PyCharm, WebStorm, IntelliJ, etc.:

1. The Find window is much better in PyCharm. I can search for something in order to do a cross-project refactor. As I go through each entry, I don't lose my place in the find results, even if I have to edit the code for a few minutes. (Trying to do the same in VS Code is a fairly frustrating experience.) If I need to search for something else, I can save the results in a new…

Here are my notes from Chrome Dev Summit 2017:Here's the schedule.Here are the videos. KeynoteBen Galbraith and Dion Almaer, Director, Chrome Web Platform and Director, Developer Relations@bgalbs and @dalmaerThis was the best talk of the whole conference. They covered a lot of new stuff in a very short amount of time. This one talk is the talk that's the most worth watching.They plugged PWAs (Progressive Web Apps).Lots of browsers support Service Workers. It's still in development for Edge and WebKit, though.Workbox is a library they built for working with Service Workers. It's used by 70% of the sites using Service Workers.They plugged letsencrypt.org.64% of traffic is transmitted over HTTPS on Chrome on Android.They're going to start marking any form that isn't submitted over HTTPS as not secure.Use autofill completion hints to help out Chrome with autofill.They plugged PaymentRequest. It's a payment UI that is built into Chrome itself. It cuts down the tr…

You know that problem about there only being two hard problems in computer science? Today, I broke a page in production because of a cache invalidation issue when I tried to rename something.

I have a real soft spot in my heart for C, and I really do think there are still some valid use cases for C. However, in most cases, you should use something higher level. Case in point:

I was watching a video on C called How I program C. Here's a screenshot:

The video was highly recommended by someone. However, at some point he said (roughly), "I'd rather have 100 lines of C code that I wrote myself than 2 lines of mysterious code in a higher level language because I'll at least know exactly what's going on in the C code, so there won't be any bugs hiding."

It really made me think, where are bugs more likely to hide? 2 lines of Python or 100 lines of C? What about 2 lines of Go code?

Anyway, I was surprised that he said he said he only spent 20 minutes a year fixing memory leaks in his C code. Hence, I decided to peruse the comments on YouTube:

Yeah, ok, I'm done.

A few months ago, I was talking to my buddy, Jarek. He highly recommended Andrew Ng's Machine Learning course on Coursera. He suggested I take it. For some reason, I felt called to take it, so I did. It's one of the best courses I've ever taken.

I'm not going to lie--it was quite challenging. It's been a long time since I've done serious math like that. However, I think it was a perfect balance of rigorous yet still approachable and practical. Thank you, Dr. Ng.

I didn't think I'd be able to take the class given my already busy life. However, my wife suggested I take Fridays off to work on it. My bosses, Inanc and Eric, let me take vacation time every Friday in order to work on the class. It took about two full days per week to keep up with the class.

I'm also grateful to my co-workers, Mathilde and Arnon, for telling me I'd be able to make it through the course. However, I'm most grateful to my wife for not only encouraging me but also lett…

IntroductionI went to ForwardJS. Here are my notes for day 2:Create Electronic Dance Music with JavaScriptWalmik Deshpande"When you go to a club or a party or a rave.. What is one of the most obvious things you notice about the music?"It's repetitive!"Since we are engineers, what comes first to mind when we see something repeating itself over and over again?"Automate the damn thing \m/"I've created a Node.js module called Scribbletune which has a very minimalistic API (only 3 methods). I'd like to showcase this module along with the options available to us today when it comes to creating music with JavaScript & Node.js right from the terminal. Using my module and regular JavaScript String and Array functions I will put together the structure of a Electronic Dance Music track and show how easy it is for you to start dabbling with EDM using JavaScript"Unfortunately, I missed this talk. I heard the demos were pretty awesome.One person told me…

IntroductionI went to ForwardJS. Here are my notes for day 1:Livable CodeSarah Mei @sarahmei @LivableCodeShe's the chief architect at devmind.io. She's been doing software consulting for 10 years--half of her career. She runs RubyConf and RailsConf.She talked at a very high level about the software process in general such as the Capability Maturity Model, Conway's Law, the statement that there's no silver bullet, etc.There's the code, and then there's the team. She's focusing on the codebase.If you see a problem in your code, it's reflecting a problem in your team, and vice versa.http://bit.ly/brooks-1986 is Brooks' paper on "No Silver Bullet".Software is more like theater people putting together a play than factory workers making cars.Software projects are never "done" these days.She talked about software architecture.New jobs are in application development. Rarely do they focus on the architectural concerns. The frameworks alre…