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Blag

  1. Shorth is Better Than Length

    So the writer who breeds
    more words than he needs
    is making a chore
    for the reader who reads.

    — Dr. Seuss

  2. Ambition of Pens

    Every pen has the potential to write the next great story. There are times I wonder if mine find me disappointing.

  3. Feline Affection

    Is my cat trying to show affection, or is she just really bad at smothering?

  4. Client Haiku

    From experience,
    doing what the client asks
    is a bad idea.

  5. Pet Happiness

    I'm never certain whether my dog is truly happy to see me, or whether he's just relieved to no longer be alone with the cat.

  6. Scriptless Dynamic SVG

    an SVG clock that changes the time shown depending on its document fragment

    Last Saturday I was messing around with SVG creating a clock to use to show simple timestamps. I'm not much of an artist so I kept things simple, with a circle and two lines for the arms. I thought it'd be really neat if I could use the same SVG image to show any time. Rotating the arms was easy enough via JS, a little bit of code and everything worked just fine.

    I then decided that I'd like to be able to use the SVG image from an <img> tag. SVG isn't allowed to execute scripts when viewed in HTML image tags due to security restrictions. This meant that I couldn't just rotate the arms from JS anymore. I considered setting up a server side script to generate the appropriate clock from query string parameters, but that would be far too easy, and not particularly impressive. Also, the script wouldn't be very portable. I wanted something that I could drop in elsewhere, without needing to rely on a particular server being up.

  7. How to write code

    I'm on Stack Overflow a lot.

    A lot.

    So I often see people ask questions along the lines of:

    I have [problem], how do I write code to solve [problem].

    And then they proceed to not show any relevant code or even attempt to help themselves.

    Writing code is a lot like drawing an owl:

    How to draw an owl: 1. draw some circles 2. draw the rest of the fucking owl

    There's no trick to writing code, it's two simple steps.

    1. Write some functions
    2. Write the rest of the fucking code

  9. Justin Searls on the 80-20 rule

    But luckily because I manage a business now I know a lot of project management tricks like the 80-20 rule.

    If you're not familiar the 80-20 rule says, ‘Do a job until it's 80% done and then quit’.

    — Justin Searls

  10. Good Code

    10 PRINT "HOME" 20 PRINT "SWEET" 30 PRINT "HOME" 40 GOTO 10

    I do not know what good code looks like.

    I would not recognize it if I saw it.

    I know this because I do know what bad code looks like. I see bad code every day. Most of the bad code I see every day is my own. I know what bad code looks like because I see it whenever I fix a bug. I see it whenever I refactor code to be shorter, more concise, and more readable.

    I am fortunate when the code I'm debugging was written in a clean manner. I am fortunate when the code I'm debugging is well formatted. These qualities make my job easier, but they do not make good code.