Henry Catalini Smith

The time I got caught planning a nuclear attack on the USA

I missed a phone call at work from my landlord this week. Landlord phone calls are scary. “Our rent payment probably hasn’t gone out or something”, I began to worry. I tend to panic quickly. “Shit, I bet it failed because our bank account is empty. Somebody’s gotten in and emptied out all our money. Fuck.” Fearing the worst, I phoned back straight away to check what was up.

Code I Like: Twig Loaders

The Twig templating library for PHP is really quite a nice piece of software. In terms of external quality, it’s stable, open source, actively maintained, and well documented. I’ve been lucky enough to spend some time at work exploring its internals from time to time over the last 12 months or so, and I’ve found the internal quality to be equally high. It’s a pleasure to work with code that has been properly looked after.

Monkeypatches broke my build

The prevalence of monkey patching as a Ruby development practice is a complete pain in the arse. Sure, some of Ruby’s expressiveness as a tool for building DSLs is derived from the ability to monkey patch things like 10.days.ago into the core classes. Admittedly, I occasionally indulge my sweet tooth at the Rails all-you-can-eat syntactic sugar buffet. But it’s not my favourite approach to software development by a long shot.

Debian Squeeze Vagrant Base Box

In an effort to suck less at dealing with all the various sysadmin-related tasks that come hand-in-hand with being a web developer, I’m learning my way around Vagrant and Chef.

switch (true)

A while ago I learned a quirky little programming trick which has occasionally come in handy. It’s something I picked up from some random blog post about ‘cool programming tricks’ that I can no longer find. It involves the switch statement, which is fairly universal in programming languages and normally looks like this:

Planarity

Alpine Storage

University Group Project