tech
Lookarounds, like regular expressions in general, are too often avoided. Why? We avoid them because we don't understand them. The time has come. The Lookarounds There are 4 types lookarounds. They are categorized in two ways: direction (ahead and behind) and positivity (positive and negative). Combined, there are
process
Some scale problems should go unsolved. No. Most scale problems should go unsolved. "To your pitchforks!", you shout. "Burn the heretic!" Hear me out. The thing is, most scale problems aren't problems at all. They are "problems". "Problems" are issues
tech
Phantoms, ghouls, spectres; semi-transparent demons and star antagonists of your horror story du jour. So much of their frightfulness stems from their intangible nature. People see them and know they exist, but to put your finger on one seems all but impossible. Thus is the problem with phantom code. It
Revenue
Most of my past projects are bad at collecting money. Some are literally incapable of it. Of all the mistakes i've made as an engineer, i list this among the worst. Gone are the days when e-commerce was a complicated and concerning development. Now, websites with basic integrations
tech
The late George Carlin once joked about the foolishness of human ingenuity. He said that, in the past, humans built houses to shield themselves from the cold. A warm enclosure inside of the cold outdoors. But then our food was too warm, so we built a refrigerator. A cold enclosure
tech
Software is vast and growing. It seems like every week a new editor, library, framework, or language is released. I've written before about the value of learning things that are unnecessary, but with so much material, how do we find the unnecessary amidst the unrelated and unhelpful. How
tips
Use p. Rails has three printing methods, two are common, one is less so. 1. print prints the string (to_s) version of what is passed to it. * puts works like print but adds a newline \n. * p prints the .inspect version of what is passed to it, along with
growth
The world's best programmers share exactly one thing in common: a passion. That passion is not for code. The passion is for creation. We are addicted to creation, whether it's solutions, websites or software. For most of us, technologies we do not require to create are,
Communication
Software is a house. An intranet is a gated community and a proof of concept is nothing but a model home. To software people, these analogies are novel. To non-technical clients, they can be the difference between confusion and clarity. We have all been frustrated by the communication gap between
tech
Readers of the previous post in this series will remember a Pig Latin translator we created using groups and captures. That translator included a selector, \b, we had not yet explored. It was described as a "zero-width" selector. The concept can be a bit foreign. Up to this
tech
In the first post of this series, we looked at the basic building blocks of regular expressions: the characters and quantities. The next major building blocks are groupings and captures. Both features are based off the parenthesis, and can be used to great effect. Groupings Groups allow a regular expression
tech
Regular expressions, like CSS or the workings of Agile process, are some of the least understood coding aspects among young programmers, and for good reason. Regex use a syntax entirely of their own, they are rarely a necessity when building a solution, and they are infamous for their inability to