Slack Workflows Gotchas: Problems with Programming Custom Slack Bots

This blog runs on Jekyll, and I generate my post templates using Rake commands. When getting set up on a new laptop I ran into a new issue: $ rake draft["blog title"] zsh: no matches found: draft[blog title] Apple changed the default shell from bash to zsh back in 2019 with macOS Catalina. zsh helpfully tries to expand the square bracket...

This is a really small programming “style” best practice that came up at work last week. TLDR; don’t pre-concatenate strings in Java log calls! I’m working in Java now after a long stint in Scala-land. I used Java in university and at my first few internships but haven’t worked in it since then. So, there are a lot of coding conventions and best...

I subscribe to several Patreons that offer paywalled video content. Some of these are reference materials that I might want to re-watch over and over again, and I find it annoying to have to stream them when I could just download the videos and have them available offline. There are loads of sketchy Chrome and Firefox extensions that purport to...

My organization typically interviews in pairs: two interviewers, one candidate. This is beneficial for several reasons: it helps interviewers calibrate against each other, it frees up one person to take notes while the other asks a question, it helps the candidate meet more potential coworkers during the process. Sometimes it also creates an...

If you’ve delved into programming-for-art before, chances are that you’ve encountered Processing. It’s a phenomenally successful tool for coding for visual art. Processing describes itself as “a flexible software sketchbook and a language for learning how to code within the context of the visual arts”. It’s based loosely on Java, but it ships...