Don't miss a post! Subscribe to my mailing list.

Guidelines for Writing Commit Messages
Many developers take the skill of writing a good commit messages for granted. It is an essential skill that requires discipline. While there are a variety of guidelines and opinions about writing them, I'm going to share my current preferences. These...

Middleman, Shadow-CLJS and React
A few months ago I wrote about integrating Middleman with Shadow-CLJS. Today I'm going to expand on that by showing you how to add React to the mix by making a simple BMI calculator from scratch. I'm not going to spend too much time explaining the...

Middleman Shadow-CLJS Project Template
Awhile ago I wrote about how to set up Shadow-CLJS with Middleman. I finally got around to making a Middleman project template to ease the process of setting up Shadow-CLJS. The source is available on GitHub.
To use the template, you'll need to have...

Write the Assertion First
When writing automated tests (whether in a TDD fashion or otherwise) I find it helpful to write the assertion first, before any setup code. There are two main reasons I think it is helpful.
One, I think it's useful to begin with the end in mind. Writing...

Formatting Currency in JavaScript
The other day I needed to format some currency values in JavaScript. I remembered coming across Intl.NumberFormat a long time ago on another project, but browser support was sketchy. I looked up the most recent info on caniuse and thankfully almost...

ClojureScript with Middleman via Shadow-CLJS
Ruby's Middleman is my preferred tool when I need to generate a static website. In this post I'm going to show you how to set up a Middleman project that uses ClojureScript instead of the default JavaScript or CoffeeScript that ships with Middleman...

boot-selmer
Introduction
I’ve been playing around with Clojure and ClojureScript for awhile. So far I’ve always used Leiningen for managing dependencies and build tasks. I recently decided to give Boot a try. I needed to create a Boot task for compiling Selmer

xclip for Ubuntu
Awhile back I wrote about pbcopy
for OS X. These days I find myself using Ubuntu quite often and missed having pbcopy
. Turns out there is a package called xclip that does the same thing on Ubuntu! Give it a try!

Rails Data Migration Results
When writing data migrations, it can be useful to know the number of records that were updated / created. If you run your migration in a Rails console, ActiveRecord will print out the database response object like this for PostgreSQL:
2.1.5 :008 >

OS X pbcopy
OS X has a nifty utility program named pbcopy
that I just learned about which can be used to copy things to the system clipboard.
For example:
cat foo.txt | pbcopy
or pbcopy < foo.txt
will copy the contents of foo.txt
onto the system clipboard.