Helix: Why (And How) I Use It

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...

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...

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 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...

Javascript’s new “Explicit Resource Management” proposal adds the using statement, a way to automatically close resources after you’ve finished using them. But as part of the same proposal, a number of other APIs have been added that make using even more useful. I couldn’t find a lot of documentation out there when I was trying to figure out how...