Chris Farber on Atomic Spin

12 Emacs Keybindings Worth Learning

Learning a few Emacs Keybindings can make you more effective in a variety of places, even if you don't use Emacs as your editor. The most basic are shortcuts that let you move your

Development Practices

Save Side Effects for Last

Why save side effects for last? It will make your code less buggy and easier to test (because it naturally guides you closer to functional programming).

Developer Tools

Easily Reloading your Clojure Project in Spacemacs

With this configuration in place, I can tear down and reload my entire Clojure-based app, while it's running in a REPL embedded in Spacemacs.

Developer Tools

Exporting Application Data for Business Users? Use XLSX, Not CSV

When you analyze the tradeoffs, there really isn’t any category that CSV actually wins in. CSVs simply have several inherent problems.

Software Science

What is Point-Free Notation & When Does it Make Code More Readable?

Sometimes, providing names for tangential arguments can cloud mathematical concepts. Point-free notation can help remove those distractions.

iOS / OS X

Understanding UIAppearance Container Hierarchies

The mechanics for UIAppearance proxies for views contained in other views does not work as you may expect coming from CSS. Here's how it's different.

Developer Tools

(Clojure) Spec-ing Data from JSON

My first experience creating Clojure specs for JSON data from an external system taught me that it's a bit of an artform. These are some things I learned.

Ruby

Control Flow in Ruby Blocks

I recently found myself needing to return early from a block passed into a method in Ruby. The way to do this is fairly simple and obvious in hindsight.

Developer Tools

Reflecting on Single-Page Applications

SPA frameworks promised to help the development and user experience. How have they lived up to the user experience promises?

Personal Optimization

Why I Ditched Spotlight for Spreadsheets

macOS's Spotlight feature is really handy for doing basic calculations, but you really should be using spreadsheets instead.

Development Practices

Type Systems Aren’t Magic

I’ve been learning Haskell to see what it’s like to have a good type system, and what I’ve seen so far is that types aren’t magic or a panacea.

Developer Tools

How RuboCop Made Me a Fan of Linters

RuboCop is a very fancy linter for Ruby. It reads your Ruby code and prints out a report about all the things you're doing "wrong."

Chris Farber

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