Writing SipHash: my introduction to NIFs in Elixir

After recently discovering SipHash when searching for a solid algorithm to use in another project, I decided to take a shot at writing an implementation in Elixir as an exercise (having only started picking up Elixir in the last few weeks or so). The project is available on GitHu…

Introducing Oryx; a convient scaffolding library for Node.js and Express

Say hello to Oryx. Oryx is a project I have been working on for a little over a month now, born from another project I'm currently working on (but haven't yet released). It's designed to be a fairly straightforward way to set up an Express app to use models and expose models via…

Java 8 Custom Collectors: Jackson ArrayNode

Streams are one of the niceties provided in JDK 8 and they provide extreme flexibility to the user. They make it extremely easy to transform Collections in some way, either serially or in parallel. One of the most awesome things about Streams is that they're extremely extensible.…

Using MongoDB with Elixir, Phoenix and Ecto

This is as much for my reference as anyone else's, so I hope everything is clear enough for newcomers. Update: Refer here for an example project following the method below. Due to having gotten a little bored with Node.js in recent times, and also a lack of engagement with the la…

Dot Notes: a simple module for parsing dot notation

Recently I have somehow found myself in need of using JavaScript dot notation to represent values a bit too often to bother constantly rewriting the code for it. Turns out, there's no real (and nice) way to do this in the way that I wanted. Perhaps I'm conforming to some weird st…

Safely Creating Custom Handlebars Helpers For Ghost Blogs

I'm fairly new to Handlebars, the templating system that the blogging system Ghost uses, but my initial impressions are that it's a pretty sweet tool to use. However, it's somewhat limited when you're developing a Ghost blog, due to the fact that Ghost only implements certain def…

Neek - A faster way to remove duplicates in files

You may be aware of the *nix tool uniq, used to filter duplicate values from within files. Uniq is a simple way to remove duplicated lines within a file via a simple command. The downside to uniq is that it requires the input to be sorted, which can be a huge downfall, and someti…

Asynchronous Test Loops With Mocha Using it-each

Nowadays people are using Mocha more and more for testing their JavaScript/NodeJS code. One major limitation of Mocha is that there is no real way to loop tests asynchronously and maintain the ability to keep track of what's happening (such as realising which iteration a test fai…

Redirecting An InputStream To An OutputStream In Java

After working with NodeJS, Streams have always been an annoyance for me in Java (especially when I was first learning), simply due to the fact that you had to wait for the input to buffer and be fed through the abstract read() method of the InputStream interface. Most examples ar…

Migrating From Subversion To Git The Easy Way

Until recently, I was a big fan of using Subversion for most of my private projects. Now, however, I'd rather be using Git. This is all well and good for new projects, but how do I move the mature projects from my repository to Git (specifically GitHub)? Turns out, it's actually…