Jerome Covington

Take a break for a code debugging exercise in any language with a prompt for ChatGPT

Let’s play a game: I want to get better at recognizing bugs in code, and would like you to provide challenges for me to do so. When I prompt you with the words “Next exercise: <language>” please provide code in that langauge that has a bug in

In Brief

My "In Brief" series of Gists is a collection of one-pagers for anyone who is memory-challenged or just needs a little kickstart in the morning before they've had their coffee. I hope you find the following memory aids as helpful as I do. * cURL in brief

javascript

The Journey is the Thing

...or, a brief introduction to machine omletting. Thinking back on when I started programming as a kid, I could pretty well sum up the playing around that I did then (and to be honest most of the work I do now) as writing a recipe. The "deliverable" was

javascript

Async/await using generator & Promises

An interesting tactic when researching language features is to re-create newer features, using prior, earlier supported features. For example, is it possible to approximate the features and syntax flow provided by async/await, but using only generators and Promises? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Baseline example in native async/await The canonical example of

Building vim 8 on Ubuntu with system clipboard support

I really love doing my coding work in vim, and I also love working on Ubuntu (lately I've been on Ubuntu 17.10 and am really enjoying Gnome shell). At any rate I like to use vim 8 because it has asynchronous i/o support, which I need

javascript

It's prototypes all the way down

I took the time to illustrate the similarities between traditional JavaScript prototypal inheritance using constructor functions to manage inheritance, and the syntax afforded by ES2015 classes. I originally did this to help clear up some incomplete understanding on my team, but I thought that other folks might benefit from seeing

javascript

Iteratively speaking

In order to better illustrate their internal differences, I thought it would be interesting to create polyfills for some Array.prototype methods. What follows is the code for polyfills, example usage, and a little discussion. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here is a polyfill for Array.prototype.map() [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/

Tools to make developing on macOS pleasant

I drift between Ubuntu [https://www.ubuntu.com/] and macOS [https://www.apple.com/macos/sierra/] as my development environment. My most recent stretch of time with the latter caused me to document what I could do to make it more pleasant and productive. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For macOS, Homebrew [https://brew.

javascript

Basic coercion of primitives

Nothing special here, but still worth reviewing, and with a few explanations: Number (e.g. double): +arg Int32: ~~arg or arg|0 Uint32: arg >>> 0 String: ''+arg Boolean: !!arg -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sources: Trevor Norris, Introduction to the three key areas of performance [https://gist.github.com/

Code ecosystems, their supporting communities and "The Round River"

There is an expanding and beneficial discussion happening among the maintainers, consumers, and interested bystanders around open source projects that borrows verbiage coined in the study of ecology and conservationism. It seems to me that this is readily apparent in the NodeJS and NPM projects. "Harmony with land is

Contain yourself

It's becoming clear that companies such as Joyent (original corporate steward of NodeJS), and NodeSource (whose "NodeJS as a Service" is their core competency), and even behemoths such as Google (whose interest in NodeJS may seem peripheral but also seems to be gaining ground in their

Galvanizing towards equality

We are duty-bound to dismantle the machinations with which we have entered into complicity on the way to achieving success, if by their nature they inhibit the success of others. On a good day I can feel aligned with this sentiment. On a bad day I feel it engenders needless

Your predecessor was not blessed with infinite time

Our theories of metaphysics and the afterlife notwithstanding, those who came before us did not have the gift of infinite time or unwavering foresight when they created their libraries, languages, algorithms, patterns and on and on. When it comes down to developing our tactics as we approach a new problem

Personal Awareness as Software Development Asset

When you spend most of your time meeting somebody else's definition of excellence, you miss out on a lot of opportunities to understand your own work. And understanding your work, literally “knowing what you are doing”, is what amounts to the difference between an adequate developer, and an

&& and || operators as control flow

Try this: > var a = 'b' || 'c'; > a; < "b" Now: > var x = 'y' && 'z'; > x; < "z" Aha! So the && and || operators, in the context of the example above, can

javascript

Patently falsey

* false * 0 (zero) * "" (empty string) * null * undefined * NaN In JavaScript, what do all of the above values have in common? If you guessed "they are all falsey", you are correct, and you have won yourself a copy of The Hole in the Zero [http://www.amazon.

Essentials

It can be argued that tech is a want not a need. The opposite can be argued. The answer to what a need vs. a want is, is not a one-size-fits-all answer. What is a need for you, is a want for me...maybe vice-versa. Maybe the important thing to

Open collaboration and the rebirth of reggae

I'm pretty deep in the code most times, it seems. I wear my software engineer hat on and off the job, at least in terms of how I approach thinking about many problems and solutions in life. Every so often, though, I have the pleasure of working on

if (UI === OS) { 'try harder' }

Can we really say that Apple has the market cornered on good, proper, thoughtful, insightful UI design? Specifically, and as it relates to my trajectory as a software engineer, need I be tethered to OSX as a front end specialist/full stack generalist? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I would like to live in

Everything that's Apple that's not Apple

When I was spending a lot of time thinking deeply about networking, memorizing the http stack, playing with router simulation software, the works, my best friend was Red Hat. Discovering Linux in this way was some of the most worthwhile time I have spent away from family or music. During

Internal consistency and interfaces

We can think that our development effort hinges on single language implementations, lack of context switching, etc. But what really allows us to be effective is when the modules that we use, as well as those we create, have a deterministic, internal consistency and provide reliable interfaces with adherence to

Functions with clearly communicated intent

It pays to meditate on whether your functions can make any sort of promise as to their outcome. That is, in this case we are talking about a promise as a clearly communicate intent toward an end result, not the JavaScript Promise API, although what we are going to talk

inspiration

Jazz improvisation, "licks" and the path of least astonishment

Here is a hidden message in many creative disciplines, which seems to go counter to what we may think our goals of originality mean: "It is better to sound like somebody else than nobody at all." There is much pressure in the creative arts, in which I do

Degobah and JavaScript Allongé

LUKE (into comlink) We're not going to regroup with the others. Artoo begins a protest, whistling an unbelieving, "What?!" Luke reads Artoo's exclamation on his control panel. LUKE (into comlink) We're going to the Dagobah system. Luke checks his readouts and makes

Can you rewrite it within a day?

How much complexity can you hold in your head? If you were interrupted in the middle of coding, would you be able to pick up where you left off a day later without any inhibitors? Is your implementation simple enough that, if required, you could rewrite it from scratch in