In Absentia

There’s a fantastic free online course (MOOC) for the Russian-speaking developer community on Stepik for learning Haskell - a two-part course titled Functional Programming in Haskell by Denis Moskvin, (then) associate professor at the St. Petersburg Academic University. I recently re-watched the course (having completed it previously) and decided to take notes and summarize the course content in English for your enjoyment.

I would like to thank Denis Moskvin for providing this amazing resource for free, and urge you, if you speak Russian and want to learn Haskell, to work through the course material and exercises!

Below is the summary of the first module, Introduction, out of 5.

It’s amazing how sometimes just having a different framing of the problem helps with developing a much deeper understanding of the problem. I was working through the exercises of the Data61 Functional Programming course, assisted by Brian McKenna’s video streams, and I came accross a definition of a right fold that can be thought of as “constructor replacement”:

The expression foldr f z list replaces in list:

1. Every occurence of the cons constructor (:) with f
2. Any occurrence of the nil constructor [] with z

The book The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas suggests that as developers, we should “learn at least one new language every year.” (pg. 14)

When I recently asked a roomful of developers, if there’s anyone who had learned a new language this year, only very few hands went up. A year ago today, that would have been me in the audience, keeping my hands down.

Original title was “Monads solve a problem you might not have, but it’s a nice problem to have”, which is an homage to a great post by Krzysztof Koźmic about IoC containers.

I can’t think of another 5-letter word that strikes fear in the hearts of so many developers, coming from an object-oriended/imperative language to a functional one. So much so, this, and other M-words are outright banned on some resources.

This post will not attempt to explain monads, at least, not on purpose. This fantastic post by Max Kreminski does this better than I ever could - by showing that most “monad tutorials” (or, educational blog posts in general) have problem-solution ordering issues. Please take a moment to read this wonderful post before continuing.

Layered architectures were good, until they weren’t. Someone said ORMs, and we were tearing out our SQL statements in favor of magic.

ORMs were good, until they weren’t. You couldn’t use the generated entities in your presentation layers, because they knew too much. Someone said DTOs.

I recently started a shiny new job, and got a shiny new Macbook Pro to go with it. Having spent most of my personal and professional life on Windows, I knew that an adjustment period would have to follow. Below are my impressions, the good, bad, and the ugly side of adjusting to One Cupertino Way after a lifetime on Windows.

I was finally able to migrate from WordPress to a gorgeous, static, and blazing fast blog, hosted on GitHub Pages for free. Here is a recap of what I did, starting with exporting all data from WordPress, and finishing with setting up an automatic publishing with AppVeyor!

Let’s begin!

I’m writing this post mainly to myself, explaining how I figured out why this particular Windows Update package was failing to install on my Windows 10 (installation began, then rolled back). This can serve as a general troubleshooting step when google searches lead you nowhere.

I decided to get with the times, and get myself a mid-level ultraportable machine I can carry around while traveling. Knowing almost nothing about this category of computers (and having avoided touch-enabled hybrids/tables until now), I spent considerable time researching. My requirements were simple:

• a secondary machine (my 3 year old behemoth HP EliteBook 8570w is still the best development machine I’ve got)
• light, portable (so, about 13”), touch-enabled (most of them are, anyway)
• good typing experience (I considered a Surface 3/4 with Type Cover keyboard, but typing experience got mixed reviews)
• $1000 or less

It’s time to upgrade your favorite IDE! In this post I will list some of my favorite “off-the-beaten-path” extensions for Visual Studio that make my daily tasks much easier. I will not list the obvious ones, such as ReSharper and OzCode (or even Web Essentials), but rather few relatively unknown ones that do some very cool things.

Are you ready? Let’s begin!