Jonathan's Blog

Recent content on Jonathan's Blog
https://jonathan-frere.com/ (RSS)
visit blog
Helix: Why (And How) I Use It
12 Dec 2024 | original ↗

I’ve come to accept that I’m just a sucker for shiny nerd things. I use Rust, despite never having had a professional reason to use it in my life. I switched to Linux in my student years and I’ve never looked back since, even though it constantly breaks and I can’t get my Bluetooth headphones to connect. I have a split keyboard with home row mods...

Surprising Programmer Tools #53: The Sudoku
24 Oct 2024 | original ↗

During the Pandemic, I found the YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic, which is run by two champion puzzlers, Simon and Mark, who solve various logic puzzles, focusing mainly on variant sudoku. Variant sudoku adds additional rules to a normal sudoku grid — for example killer sudoku, where all the numbers in a certain marked area need to add up to...

10 Years of Programming
26 Sept 2024 | original ↗

As of the beginning of September, I’ve been programming “with purpose” for a decade. Before then it was just a hobby — something I could do in my room while burying my head in the sand about the Physics degree I was failing at the time. But that summer, I realised maybe if I was choosing to spend all my free time coding, maybe it was worth trying...

Adding Discussions to my Blog
5 Aug 2024 | original ↗

I enjoy reading other people’s blog posts, but I often enjoy reading the comments more. The post itself becomes a jumping-off point for further discussion, where people can add critique, additional supporting evidence, or their own alternative explanations. Or just get side-tracked by one specific line in the article and start a whole flame-war...

Why Test?
23 Jun 2024 | original ↗

Why do you write tests? I’ve been thinking about this question a lot recently. I’ve been trying to motivate some teammates that tests are worth writing. But I’m going to convince them of that, I need to be able to answer that question for myself, right? Tests sometimes get portrayed as one of the chores of software development. As a new...

I (Re)designed My Blog
29 Apr 2024 | original ↗

I’ve updated my blog. And of course, the first thing any self-respecting developer blogs about with a new blog design is that redesign itself. This is that post. Design I confess: I am not a designer. This may be obvious. But I enjoy learning about design through practice, in much the same way that a child enjoys learning about cooking by making...

How I Do Dependency Injection With Closures
31 Oct 2023 | original ↗

You can also find an edited and updated version of this post that I wrote for my employer’s blog here. A discussion came up on Reddit recently about DI, where I mentioned that one way that I’ve done DI recently for web frameworks that don’t naturally support it to using closures. Someone asked for an example, so I figured I’d explain what that...

Wait, Rust Has Effects?
15 Mar 2023 | original ↗

This post is a reply to Without Boat’s article “Patterns & Abstractions”. I originally started it as a reply on Reddit, and then I just kept on writing, so now it’s a blog post. Please read that post first (and probably the other posts linked there), but for the sake of discourse, I’ll also summarise what I got out of it: There are right now a...

Book Review: A Philosophy of Software Design
1 Jul 2020 | original ↗

This review is largely in response to the article “It’s probably time to stop recommending Clean Code”, and the ensuing Reddit discussion. A lot of really interesting points were brought up, but the big question that the author themself wasn’t able to answer was: “What should we recommend instead?” I believe the book we should be recommending is...

↑ These items are from RSS. Visit the blog itself at https://jonathan-frere.com/ to find everything else and to appreciate author's digital home.