The Programs of Christmas Week
This Week’s Program: Dec 20 - Dec 25
Merry Christmas! 🎄
Thank you for taking time away from your loved ones to spend time with your other loved one: Me.
2015 in Review
2015 is the year I launched This Week’s Program, a weekly newsletter where I highlight code I’ve written over the course of the week.
2015 is the year I started a streak of committing code out in the open every weekday.
This was my second year as an engineering director at Rent the Runway. My team focused on building up a new foundation for our web application using React, Redux, and JSON API. They’ve done some outstanding work and, as their manager, I have no problem taking partial credit. Those are technologies I’m really excited about. I’ve dabbled a bit in dev ops land with Vagrant, Ansible, and Packer. I open-sourced a Git-powered feature flag system called Flaggrocrag. I spoke at Empire JS about the DOM and Zippers.
In 2015 I used Docker for the first time to mess with Google’s Deep Dream and to use Let’s Encrypt.
I officially handed over maintenance of Handlebars.scala. I think I wrote zero Scala in all of 2015.
I set up a POSSE system so that I publish to Tumblr and Tinyletter from my website. I wrote about it in previous editions of this newsletter.
In 2015 I started using Emacs as my primary text editor.
In 2015 I decided to go deep into Clojure and am learning how to use Overtone.
There’s a lot more to say about 2015.
704d4f31c4a1d23745cc9a627ceccbae6aa5f959
The Monotron from last week was very cool, but had no
envelope,
which is another important function in making noise. Basically, I
couldn’t specify a duration for how long the monotron should run. In
this commit, I’ve changed my play function to accept a sequence of
notes. A note is a structure that has a :pitch and a
:duration. The duration is a coefficient to the length of time a
beat lasts. The fast the bpm, the shorter the duration. In this way I
can represent things like quarter notes and half notes as seen in
musical notation. I use recursive forms like first and rest to
move down the the list.
3b659cd5e995c22c8309516e8c77faa79cf5dcb6
Clojure’s Destructuring is powerful and awesome.
62763e354b8668278990fb73c3fe9633182ec2f0
I bring in a new instrument. Overtone has a built-in tb303 which I
assume is meant to mimic the
Roland TB-303. After
some experiments in the REPL. I make it play
Jingle Bells.
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My original Jingle Bells didn’t sound quite right. My wife helped me
figure out the timing for small rests to make it sound more like
Jingle Bells ought to sound. To represent the rests, I pass nil as
the pitch in the note.
(play (metronome 220) jingle-bells)
I am #blessed to have a fantastic partner that listens to bleeps and bloops coming out of my computer over and over again and helps me get them to sound right and is patient when I take some time out of Christmas day to write my Tinyletter.
Thank you for reading my writing and my code in 2015.
🎅 Mark