Some of us always follow the rabbit. It’s not because we want to. It’s just that the rabbit…
10 a.m., somewhere in Minnesota
Sit down to write a blog post. It’s basically written already in my head, just need 20 minutes to get it down.
Double check some code I’m including, and realize it doesn’t work right in an edge case that just crossed my mind.
Drop back to Sublime Text for some testing. This edge case is revealing a more substantial failure. Get a little frustrated and head to StackOverflow.
Find a StackOverflow answer that wasn’t exactly what I needed but follow a link to GitHub and start examining some code, out of context, that I think might have the answer. See a function used that I’ve never heard of and have to track it down through the repository. Turns out it’s a native function in the language that I’d never seen before.
Consider the possibilities of this functionality. What’s the use case for this? Why was it considered important enough to be part of the core functionality. Figure out some cases, start to think “so what else could this be used for?” I can think of some code that could be refactored to play with.
Grep through to find an old script and start trying out the new method. Little snag, I need to convert the data when it’s ingested. That will require a separate library. Package manager gives me a missing library error.
Run brew update to prepare for installing the needed package. See the list of changed and new packages. Wait, what does that one with the cool name do? brew home newcoolness. What? I didn’t even know this was possible!
Dig into the new package, consulting docs and trying out various pipelines. Holy cow, I should write a blog post about this. Wasn’t I doing that already? Check timestamp. Look at watch. Tomorrow, I guess, it’s time to make dinner now.
