August 3, 2025
Human Programmers - a manifesto
“In a world of abundance, the answer is curation. When the barriers to entry are lowered, the differentiator is taste. When machines are more capable than ever, personality is everything. When everyone has a team of AI yes-men at their beck and call, you need someone who says NO.” Human Programmers is a community and unDirectory of han...
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February 7, 2025
The Gift of Abstraction
When I began taking drum lessons from David Goodman everything changed for me. I had had wonderful drum teachers previously, but there was something about Dave’s approach that really clicked. There’s a strong practice of transcription in Jazz education - choosing a fragment of a recording that you love and writing down what the musicia...
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January 3, 2025
How did I get here?
From age ten my sole goal in life was to be a professional Jazz drummer. I’m not exaggerating. ‘Jazz Drummer’ was effectively my conjoined twin, forcible separation was not possible without certain death. This modus vivendi, while intense, served me well through my teenage years and early twenties. I won some awards, performed around A...
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December 29, 2024
Ruby Procs and Lambdas for the Javascript developer
If you're like me and are one of the many "Javascript everywhere" developers joining the Ruby on Rails Renaissance you may be a little confused by Blocks, Procs, and Lambdas, I know I was. Functions vs Methods To back up a little bit, let's start where the differences between Ruby and Javascript are fairly minor. Consider these two fun...
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December 20, 2024
Build and host your own link-in-bio page
This guide is intended for people who have zero or very little exposure to anything related to coding or web development. By the end of this you'll have your very own link-in-bio style website that you can host on your own domain for free. You will also understand some fundamental basics about web development. If you run into any issue...
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December 18, 2024
Yes, You Should Learn How To Code
The year 2025 is almost upon us. If you listen to certain parts of the internet you would be forgiven for having the impression that all things programming related will soon be performed exclusively by AI, "Why learn how to code? No point!". Even if we leave to one side the glaring shortcomings of even the finest AI models today (see D...
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December 15, 2024
We Are All Eyeball Hunters Now
I used to think trying to gain a following on social media was an activity for the vain. The superficial Plebeians who lacked any substantive passions so instead worshiped the false god of fame. How wrong I was. For my younger self, the aspiring Jazz musician, there was a definite answer to the following proverb: “If music is performed...
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