I’ve been working through the Elixir challenges on Exercism.io. Yesterday’s assignment was to implement a Run Length encoder and decoder in Elixir. Here’s my implementation.

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.

After a recent talk I gave that included VimScript, an attendee asked a question about the differences between keyword, match, and region following syn in a Vim syntax highlighting file. Here’s my answer.

A while back I tackled the following programming challenge:

From One End to the Other: Find the smallest possible (positive) integer that ends in a six such that if that six is removed and placed in front of the remaining digits of the number, the resulting number will be four times as large as the original.

A few weeks ago I built a program to display an LED clock. Here’s the problem, and my solution.