Recently I tried to answer a question that I think is common to consider when you’re first learning about computer programming. I’ll paraphrase:

Why can’t there be an “universal” programming language that serves all purposes?

I’ve been giving technical talks for a few years, and I’m speaking at the Vim Chicago Meetup next month about integrating React with Vim. In this post, I’m going to use that opportunity as an excuse to document my speaking process.

When a stakeholder asks for a change to the software I’m building, my typical responses are, in order: “Got it.” Then: “I’m working on that issue.” Finally: “It’s done.” Here’s an alternative: skip the first two conversations and go straight to the third. As soon as you can, just do the thing, and respond with: “It’s done.”

There’s a detail about Today I Learned some might find unusual: we never added a way to delete posts from the site. Why ignore a basic CRUD feature? We didn’t ignore it. It was intentionally omitted.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. –The Unix Philosophy

I believe in working small.

Tilex, our Phoenix port of Today I Learned, is coming really well. After a personal hiatus for RailsConf prep, I’m back full-swing. My coworkers have really been bringing quality commits as well, and I feel we are very close to a successful port.

This week I wrote an algorithm in Ruby to convert binary numbers into decimal numbers. Here’s the problem description, from Exercism:

“Convert a binary number, represented as a string (e.g. ‘101010’), to its decimal equivalent using first principles. Implement binary to decimal conversion. Given a binary input string, your program should produce a decimal output. The program should handle invalid inputs.”

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.

Here’s my annual professional review covering 2016.