I created this blog to reflect on my code and development as a programmer. In that spirit, I’d like to make a pitch to anybody reading: you should blog. ...

We introduced some breaking database changes to our Phoenix port of Today I Learned on Friday; today I deployed them to staging. Resetting an Ecto Heroku database, with new seed data, turned out to be a little tricky, and I wanted to document what I learned. ...

My first PR to a new Vim plugin was merged this week, check it out, adding non-recursive Vim mappings to vim-termbux. ...

Last week, I started a new project: porting Today I Learned from Ruby on Rails to Phoenix (Elixir). ...

What is a skill one could learn to set themselves apart from other entry-level programmers? Testing. ...

I’ve been learning and using Elixir lately, and loving it. More than once, I’ve been asked some version of the question: why are you learning Elixir? What makes this language unique? I thought I’d take a moment and try to distill my rationale. ...

Sigils are a mechanism for working with textual representations in Elixir. If you’ve ever made an array of Strings in Ruby with %w(), the API is similar. A neat feature of sigils is that we can make custom variants, or override existing Kernel variants. The latter is generally discouraged. ...

Many pull requests go through a cycle: programmer opens pull request, maintainer gives feedback, programmer makes changes, repeat until ready to merge, maintainer merges. Prior to the merge, the pull request can be messy, full of reverts, fixups, and WIP commits. In the end, those commits are noise. We can tell a better story by squashing the branch. ...

I’m learning Elixir, and today as an exercise, I was challenged to recreate Enum.sum using recursion. Here’s my solution. ...

Recently a friend asked me this question about server-side sorting in Rails. Here’s the question and my answer. ...