I wrote a 15*15, NYT-style crossword puzzle for Strange Loop. On the NYT difficulty scale, it’s roughly a Wednesday-level puzzle. However, it was written for Strange Loop and thus does presume familiarity with functional programming and math, and has a few "inside jokes." You can find the puzzle and the solution on the Strange Loop wiki. Share [...]

Yesterday’s New York Times has a good article on Google’s analysis of what works and what does not work when interviewing candidates for technical jobs. This paragraph closely matches my experience: Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, “Give me an example of a [...]

YAML’s security risks are in no way limited to Rails or Ruby. YAML documents should be treated as executable code and firewalled accordingly. Deserializing arbitrary types is user-controlled, arbitrary code execution. It’s Not Just Ruby A few weeks ago, I had a need to parse Jasmine’s jasmine.yml in some C# code. I spent some time looking at [...]

HTML input elements have a placeholder attribute which you can use to show a bit of text to prompt the end user. Although you can make an editable div by using the contenteditable attribute, it will not support the placeholder attribute. I needed to do both, so I ended up reinventing the placeholder attribute for [...]

So this tweet got a lot of attention: potch @potch alias yolo=’git commit -am "DEAL WITH IT" && git push -f origin master’ I laughed at this, not because it implies some kind of reckless disregard for process and community, but because, in 1999,  at a former employer, when our VCS was Microsoft SourceSafe, this was just the way [...]