Little late today, I was busy working/running around/watching paint dry, so I’ll keep this brief. I’ve mentioned before that git can be like a game save, it protects your butt if things go wrong and you need to get back to a certain safer place. But I also like to use git commits as a […]
Cat Herding 101: The Things That Really Go Wrong For Beginning Programmers
We had a super awesome intern working with us over the summer (I often referred to her as “my” intern, which wasn’t 100% true, but as the one on the team who had done a lot of mentoring before, I felt very mamma bear about the situation). She did some cool things and had done […]
Clojure Makes Me Feel Stupid
…but I’m kinda in love with it. Thanks to a friend/coworker I’m cautiously dipping my toe into the world of “functional programming”. I’m still not 100% certain I get the full gist of functional programming but, to my newb mind, I’d explain it as programming without consequences. Functions only depend on their inputs and external […]
How to Git Ignore without .gitignore
So I had this problem at work. I’m running a virtualenv instance on our main git repo for all my python packages. The global .gitignore obviously doesn’t know about it the way it knows to filter out node modules and other fun bits of localization and I sure as heck don’t want to add my […]
Advanced Filtering with Angular.js
Everyone (who’s used angular or seen an angular tutorial) has seen the awesome realtime angular search. This is used with a filter property, but there are more complex things you can use with filtering. On my Hack Reactor hackathon project I used filtering for just about everything. From picking out individual objects to finding just the […]
Custom APIs and Web Scraping for Science
So my team’s most recent application, Helix, involved genome visualization. We integrated it with the 23andme API, but still needed a way to find out interesting information about specific RSIDs (used by researchers and databases to refer to specific base pairs of DNA). By far the most useful and open source repository of genetic information […]
D3.js Rollups
Do you have all the data and none of the visuals? Do you just want a pretty, fast way to compare lots of data that centers around maybe just a handful of moments? D3.js can help you tame all of your data and d3.rollup is especially useful if you have lots of data that you […]
Cloud PostgreSQL Servers with Heroku
While it might be possible that I’m the only person out there who didn’t want to hassle with creating a Postgres database on my computer that needed to be passed around to my project-mates, I have a feeling there is one lost soul in the universe besides me who might find this useful. When I […]
Setting Up a Database Node Module on a Node/Express Server with Sequelize
If you just need to get a node server up and running with very few lines of code then you hopefully already know about Node/Express (if you don’t, the Express website has a pretty good intro tutorial and has good documentation to get started serving up static assets). If you need all of that and […]