I spend a fair portion of every day writing programs. As with all professions, using the right tools makes a huge difference in my productivity and general happiness. Having good tools helps me keep my gumption up. One of my favorite books is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Contrary to what the title suggests, this book is actually not about motorcycles. It’s about a lot of things; one topic is about tools and caring about your trade. ...
Today in my proofs class (MATH 290 at BYU) we talked about the concept induction. I like this, because it sounds a lot like recursion. On the Wikipedia article, there’s an excerpt from a book that illustrates the principle with an analogy using a ladder: Mathematical induction proves that we can climb as high as we like on a ladder, by proving that we can climb onto the bottom rung (the basis) and that from each rung we can climb up to the next one (the step). ...
My girlfriend works for BYU SA—it’s the division of BYU that’s responsible for planning and running events. As part of her job, she has to review song lyrics and make sure that the song is okay to play at BYU functions. This can get rather irksome. Imagine reading text looking for vulgar words or phrases. Yuck. I took some time this evening to write a little website that checks MetroLyrics for any vulgar words or phrases. ...
Emacs Tips and Tricks # To Learn About # ☒ Company-mode (completion framework for lots of stuff) ☒ YASnippets (templates) ☒ Auto-YASnippets (something like that—I installed it for temporary templates) ☒ Alchemist mode (integrates with company mode—tooling for Elixir) ☐ What do M-. and M-, do? ☐ font-lock-add-keywords would let me add new keywords to a language ☐ hi-lock ☐ highlight-phrase, unhighlight-regex ☒ Registers ☐ Auto-loading packages to make startup time shorter Things that make me happy # Undo in region (just highlight something and hit undo) Generate Backus-Nauer Forms with a slightly modified syntax with ebnf-eps-buffer Helm # You can filter buffers by pattern with Helm. ...