20130520 ladieswhocode 20130508: adventures in paranoia with sinatra+sequel, and networking

ladieswhocode is an informal meeting that takes place every month in London (and I understand other cities too, but I haven’t been there so I can’t tell!). At the beginning I was a bit skeptical as I’m not a big proponent of gender division–I’d rather prefer everyone, no matter the gender, to be able to [...]

20120928 On “Learnable programming” by Bret Victor

Surely you’ve read this essay/manifesto by the omnipresent Bret Victor already. If not, go do it. Then read Sean Barrett’s response. — For the short-attention-span readers: TL;DR Programmers who learnt during the 80s have it easier because computers were slow enough to internalise what was going on. Bret proposal’s are awesome although I don’t know [...]

20120317 A first impression on Ruby’s Mechanize

TL;DR: If you need to do screen scrapping, use ruby’s Mechanize.

20120212 My favourite GIMP plug-ins

When I used Ubuntu I normally installed a fancy package called gimp-plugin-registry that came with most of the plug-ins I liked, and then some more stuff that I never used. I had learnt to ignore that, but there was still the pain of not knowing where things were. Some filters went to “Colors”, others to [...]

20100623 ruby in the pub #4 :after

Julian Burgess (who I had virtually met via Twitter) suggested me I should attend the next ruby in the pub. It sounded decidedly odd: mixing journalists with an interest for code with ruby developers; even more strange considering I’m not a ruby expert as much as I try, so I thought it could be interesting [...]