August 2011
1 post
"New" Purely Functional Data Structures →
This StackOverflow post covers “new” purely functional data structures created since Okasaki’s book “Purely Functional Data Structures” published in 1998.
July 2011
1 post
7 tags
"The Essence of Functional Programming" Part 1:...
This is the first of a new series of posts that will take papers that I read and will explain them and attempt to make them more concrete (and less theoretical) by showing real world examples using more industry-standard languages. These papers will be tagged with theory-in-practice. For more information on the “Theory in Practice” series, read the introductory post.
Today’s...
June 2011
1 post
1 tag
Theory in Practice
I’m starting a series of blog posts, published weekly, called “Theory in Practice.” These will take papers I read from the world of academia and attempt to reiterate them in simpler, more practical terms. One way I will do this is to take the examples, often in Haskell, and rewrite them in a more practical language, such as Scala. I’ll also add more real world applications,...
March 2011
1 post
5 tags
Welcome to Ruby. We Have Many Rubies.
Although I consider myself (and I’m proud to be) a polyglot, most of my open source code is Ruby. I’ve been a Rubyist for almost 5 years now and it is still my language of choice for starting projects. Professionally, I’ve begun to use Python in the work-place, and in the process of learning Python I’ve had a hard time understanding the various Python implementations....
February 2011
2 posts
3 tags
CloudFormation: The Big Picture
Amazon announced CloudFormation to the public yesterday, and while the general opinion I could glean from various sources shows that people are excited about this new technology, many are still unsure what it is and how it fits into their current cloud workflow. I feel as though I have a firm grasp on CloudFormation and will attempt to answer some questions here.
Note: I’m definitely not a...
1 tag
Flexible Local AWS Credentials Management
The Amazon Web Services(AWS) command line tools require certain environmental variables to be set up, such as EC2_HOME for EC2 and AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and so on. Most people throw this in their bashrc file and call it good, but this quickly becomes inflexible if you have to manage more and more accounts.
For example, I happen to manage 4 separate AWS accounts (my personal account and 3 other...
January 2011
1 post
Let's Get Back to Business
Five years ago, and for about two years after that, I was an avid blogger. I maintained a personal blog that focused on PHP (specifically the Zend Framework) and a year later I launched a successful blog on Erlang, known as spawn_link. Both blogs had a readership of over 500 people, which, while not trying to brag, I was proud of.
Though both blogs brought multiple serious job offers, it was my...