Yearly Archives: 2014

My heart is banging against the steel

Nov 16 2014

My heart is banging against the steel
Feel my circuits are real
I’m a living machine

Posted in Notes, Music

Change of settings

Upgrade!

Posted on October 12, 2014 by eloone

Here are some updates, I am on a new contract since three months now. I changed my settings. This is the story of what happened to me after my last introspective dilemma. And my discovery of a new type of developers. Wanna read about that?

Continue reading →

Posted in Life, Devsworld

My brother on Golang:

Jul 22 2014

I don’t need to learn Go.
…
Because I do JAVA.
…
*Shrug*

— When he caught me reading the Golang tutorial – the new hype language these days. What a true Java bear.

Posted in Notes, Quotes

Tagged

Dev confused about how to implement his API :

Jul 01 2014

Religion is so far better than computing. If only we had some kind of prophet too, at least we would know what to do in advance. Seriously.

— Today at work. In the end, we decided to go for it and refactor later 😀

Job inquiry : software prophet.

Posted in Notes, Devsworld, Quotes

The typing symbol hack

Introducing the symbolTyper js library ♥

Posted on June 25, 2014 by eloone

Do you remember as a kid playing with the Wingdings font of Microsoft Word on Windows 95 ? Personally it’s one of my favourite memories. I used to always activate the font and type on the keyboard to discover which symbols appeared on the screen. Every key was hiding a symbol. I never really understood why this font even existed mixed in with Times New Roman and Arial. It was like a pirate in the navy, discarding any character encoding rule, outputting whatever it wanted, like a crazy font. It seemed very odd that engineers would come up with that since it follows no logic and the use is really not obvious. Anyway, I found it very fun to play with and always ended up making some posters or invites with it. In the end I would do something that approached this :

For some reason, I particularly loved the bomb symbol, it is very unique, I’ve never seen it in any other font. So this is what the hack I want to share today made me think of, typing symbols in my childhood. High moment of almost creativity.

Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Projects, Github, UI-Components

Tagged ,

By value, by reference in javascript

The pass by reference mechanism in javascript

Posted on May 1, 2014 by eloone

Lately I have realized some useful facts about the pass by reference mechanism in javascript.
Let me share them here.

To cut to the chase, there is no such thing as passing a variable as reference in javascript. Variables are always passed as values in arguments. This means that what you can do in PHP for example when you do function test(&$val){} is not possible in javascript, there is no special keyword or symbol to do that.

However, there are some cases when you can “simulate” this behaviour in javascript. But before showing you how to do that, let’s make a recap.

Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Programming, Wiki

Tagged

Dude, where’s your paranoia?

Working with Java bears

Posted on April 30, 2014 by eloone

Today’s story is about security. At work, one of our big construction site is to move old SOAP webservices into modern RESTful webservices. One of these webservices’ job is to generate a personalized pdf for a user based on the id of their banking operation. Doing this was not trivial considering our architecture, but it was rather fun, and it came with extra fun because developers are left alone with themselves to decide how to do things with no site manager to supervise how the building is going to be. No plan, just build it. Developers are expected to be their own architects. So developers are also expected to communicate with each other on how they’re going to do things. Sometimes it leads to funny situations.

Continue reading →

Posted in Stories, Devsworld

Tagged

Binary Insert : How to keep an array sorted as you insert data in it ?

With javascript and recursion

Posted on April 27, 2014 by eloone

Recently I played solving the overlapping rectangles problem. This problem is simple, it is about finding out among a set of rectangles laid out on a surface which are the ones that overlap, with code of course. I will certainly detail my solution later but since it is very big and requires a bit of work and graphics, I prefer starting by sharing small bricks of the solution now.

A brick of the solution involves scanning the x coordinates of each rectangles like you’re moving from left to right reading every x coordinate of a rectangle you encounter, both left and right side. In computing terms, this means you need a structure to put the x coordinates in, and the scanning means the structure needs to be sorted : first x coordinate is the first coordinate you encounter and therefore the smallest one, last x is the largest.

I picked an array as the data structure so I needed this array to be sorted at all times to track the x coordinates. In real life conditions, the rectangles are thrown at you in chaos order and you have to add the x coordinates to your array and keep it sorted. How would you do that? This is the very problem I intend to expose and solve in this article :

How to keep an array sorted as you insert data in it?

My code is in javascript but the reasoning I will describe is totally language agnostic, you can always apply it to your own language.
Continue reading →

Posted in Code, Algorithms

Tagged ,

You can’t be just geek, you know

The sentient developer mode

Posted on April 17, 2014 by eloone

So today I had an interesting conversation at work. They filled me in about a new position they want to open for a front engineer and they would like me to take the role. Obviously the job interests me, but it interests me only for its technical appeal because it’s an architect job – and this is what I want to do. They were pretty confident for the technical part of the job and didn’t even mention it which was reassuring. However, their biggest concern was if I would be motivated enough to learn more about the actual activity of the company in order to create interfaces with all the business logic in mind. In other words I would need to have a pretty sharp knowledge of the business logic to do the job, I would need to interact with non technical teams and such, they said “We want the closest person to the application to know our business the best” – wow. This is new.

Continue reading →

Posted in Life, Devsworld

The Infometer Concept : Making information measurable

Introducing the Infometer chrome extension

Posted on April 12, 2014 by eloone

In this article I will show you what’s missing in the way we process digital content and what we could do to improve that with the concept of “Infometer”. It is the rationale behind the Infometer chrome extension that I also introduce here as an illustration of this concept. Continue reading →

So I am a heavy reader. My best rate is one book per week. I read mostly practical books that make me learn something and sometimes novels. My reading is consequently very goal driven : I have to understand and learn. Being rather a practical reader, I have developed some reading techniques that make me read faster, with more focus, so that I learn more efficiently.

Continue reading →

Posted in Thoughts, Thinking, Projects, U.I, Github

Tagged ,