Yesterday in programming workshop I decided to see if I could build a simple web application in PHP in a few hours. The project was one I had been thinking about for years that was inspired by a site I had found a while ago. The idea was a choose your own adventure story in-which readers add their own branches as they go. The original allowed users to create pages and specify all of the options for those pages. Whenever an option was chosen for the first time, the user was prompted to make a new page. The app I built yesterday is slightly different in that users can add options to any page but they must specify the description of the page it goes to when they do. Continue reading
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Computer Science Bananagrams
One of the perils of studying Computers at a tiny liberal arts college is that you don’t usually have many peers to discuss the subject with. Lately I’ve been lucky as the department seems to be experiencing a surge of student interest. Today as I was playing bananagrams in the dining hall the group of players gradually evolved to consist entirely of CS students. As we were playing, we kept remarking how nice it would be if we could use the sort of nonsense acronym/words that are so pervasive in computer science. Continue reading
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Where Ruby and Python collide
I had an idea to make a file that was simultaneously a valid ruby script and a valid python script. I’m not sure what prompted this idea but I wanted to know if it was possible and I eventually came up with the following: Continue reading
Posted in Languages, Python, Ruby
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Zsh Customization and Beautification
So I was working on a project in Ruby with my friend Isaac when I noticed that his terminal looked really cool. I asked him about it and he said it was zsh with a plugin called zsh-syntax-highlighting. I found the project’s github page and tried setting it up but it didn’t immediately work. Continue reading
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A Semester Studying Open Source Software
This post is the final paper I wrote for my self-taught open source software class this semester.
This semester, in an attempt further my education in the art of making great software, I began looking at how software is made in the open source world. I chose to look at this field for several reasons. I’ve been quite interested in open source software as long as I’ve known about it. I appreciate the social/economic benefits of software that is made by individuals who want it to be of quality as opposed to corporations that simply want to make money (and are therefore frequently motivated to compromise quality for business reasons e.g. planned obsolescence etc.). My experience with academic vs. professional programming also leads me to believe that people are far more likely to cut corners when they’re getting paid. Another reason for looking into open source was that large-scale software is often made in teams. I had had very little experience working on software with a group and, being at tiny isolated liberal arts school with a similarly tiny computer science department, I realized that this was a key missing component of my education. This would also give me an opportunity to compare my coding to others’ so as to get a sense of how I need to improve. Continue reading
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