Rebecca Owen rebecca-owen

Installing i3-gaps

Dependencies

i3-gaps has some packages that are required for it to work so install these things:

sudo apt install libxcb1-dev libxcb-keysyms1-dev libpango1.0-dev libxcb-util0-dev libxcb-icccm4-dev libyajl-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libxcb-randr0-dev libev-dev libxcb-cursor-dev libxcb-xinerama0-dev libxcb-xkb-dev libxkbcommon-dev libxkbcommon-x11-dev autoconf xutils-dev libtool automake

You also need to install libxcb-xrm-dev, but I got Unable to locate package libxcb-xrm-dev when trying to install from the apt repositories on Ubuntu 16.04. If this happens to you, just install it from source using these commands:

mkdir tmp

⚠️ this is now stupidly out of date

Computers

13" Macbook Pro 3.3 GHz i7 (late 2016)
Microsoft Surface Book (2016)

Peripherals

Dell up3216q 32" monitor

Someone sent me an email asking me what advice I had for new developers. I get this question a bunch, so I wanted to put all my thoughts in one place, that I can update as I get more ideas!

I answered this a bunch on my AMA repo, so here's some initial general answers, before I get to some of the specific questions:

how to find a project to work on: notwaldorf/ama#33
how I learn: notwaldorf/ama#32
what to learn: notwaldorf/ama#51
advice for your first job: notwaldorf/ama#59

A composable pattern for pure state machines with effects

State machines are everywhere in interactive systems, but they're rarely defined clearly and explicitly. Given some big blob of code including implicit state machines, which transitions are possible and under what conditions? What effects take place on what transitions?

There are existing design patterns for state machines, but all the patterns I've seen complect side effects with the structure of the state machine itself. Instances of these patterns are difficult to test without mocking, and they end up with more dependencies. Worse, the classic patterns compose poorly: hierarchical state machines are typically not straightforward extensions. The functional programming world has solutions, but they don't transpose neatly enough to be broadly usable in mainstream languages.

Here I present a composable pattern for pure state machiness with effects,

Using Git to Manage a Live Web Site

Overview

As a freelancer, I build a lot of web sites. That's a lot of code changes to track. Thankfully, a Git-enabled workflow with proper branching makes short work of project tracking. I can easily see development features in branches as well as a snapshot of the sites' production code. A nice addition to that workflow is that ability to use Git to push updates to any of the various sites I work on while committing changes.

ANNOUNCEMENT

I have moved this over to the Tech Interview Cheat Sheet Repo and has been expanded and even has code challenges you can run and practice against!

\

	## Bash functions to compress pdf files
	## Usage:
	## $ source compress-pdf.sh
	## $ compress-pdf-medium
	function compress-pdf-medium {
	# Medium level compression
	# Medium does mean it's the medium quality level
	gs \
	-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
	-dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \

	# this original one uses values returned from 'brew info'
	brew list --formula \| xargs -n1 -P8 -I {} \
	sh -c "brew info {} \| egrep '[0-9]* files, ' \| sed 's/^.[0-9] files, \(.\)).$/{} \1/'" \| \
	sort -h -r -k2 - \| column -t

	# faster alternative using 'du'
	du -sch $(brew --cellar)// \| sed "s\|$(brew --cellar)/\([^/]\)/.\|\1\|" \| sort -k1h