Two shots wail; the bullets scream. They duck – under tables, under seats – underneath the collapse of the crowd. Two shots wail; The professor professes in prayer; pouring pigment. Seconds sear; sixty scars spread across – civilians. Two shots to the temple – double-barreled dictates – a dismal dismissal. Sons – sleep six feet... Read More

The elderly – coughing the finest of colds: aged for tens of years. Read More

All of the jargon and confusingly said theories in textbooks and online resources are quite useless when you’re trying to learn database theory for the first time. Below is a really layperson-focused (almost mechanical) set of rules for when you’re trying to determine the normal form of a database table. Visually, a functional dependency could... Read More

I’m writing tests for a node.js tool that I’m working on and hit a snag in trying to mock (i.e., simulate) a dynamic npm install of a module within a subdirectory. I tried a bunch of ideas and ended up with a simple, perhaps not ideal, but effective solution. TL;DR: Pre-install all of the potentially... Read More

Dead grass Between railroad tracks; Where metal and cement Restrict life. I just want to be green. I just want to be green. Read More

Here’s a really useful function that I wrote to detect if a given structure already exists within a list of structures. The gist of the function is that it converts structs to cell matrices of strings and uses the beautiful ismember() function (the version acting on cells of strings) to determine if the “entity” exists... Read More

We all fall in love – not gracefully ascend. Because it was – mistake. Read More

This article is cross-posted from Medium and a response to the following article on tech hiring being broken There are some interesting points in the above article on why folks fear and/or should avoid the whiteboard. I think the whiteboard hate is a crutch. It’s like paper, but on a wall Many preparatory materials will tell... Read More

Eureka! That’s the feeling I had when I finally saw how Object.create could help me in achieving the inheritance-oriented behavior I was after. I’d been reading lots about prototypal inheritance in JS and understood bits and pieces, but it finally started to click recently. Here are some thoughts and (intentionally simplified) explanations that will hopefully help you... Read More

I architected and built the entire front-end for the new profile app at YouNow. The project served as my first Backbone.js application. I had tried learning the library a handful of times before, to no avail. I kept wondering ”why is Backbone even necessary?” Through a series of posts, I’d like to shed some light... Read More