I fell behind on my Skill Issues due to business at work. Hopefully this is a fun one to make it up to everyone.

A Deeply Unserious Take

This week my timeline was "blessed" with an extremely bad take. Apparently Ruby isn't "a serious programming language" and that's a problem. I'd originally planned on offering a refutation of the article, but it doesn't deserve the effort. The author seems to be trying to make a career of criticizing programming languages in WIRED. Good luck with that, or whatever.

Instead, here's the author posting his article on Twitter, only to receive a mere five retweets, four likes, and two comments, both insulting the article.

That second comment did offer some very good, constructive advice, too. The world doesn't need more negativity. Instead, let's heed the wise words of Why the Lucky Stiff:

when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create.

I'm creating something deeply unserious with the Advent of Code this year. I wasn't actually going to participate this year, but Eric decided to cut it down to only 12 puzzles, which is much more manageable. In the years where I've started but not finished, that's about how many I got through.

I've only completed the first puzzle as of this writing (and I'm not planning on keeping pace as they are released), but I'm very happy with the solution. I should say, we are very happy with solution.

I spent Tuesday evening collaborating with my friend Tom Van Manen on the first puzzle, coming up with a solution that includes:

• Dynamic method definition
• Refinements
• evaling the puzzle input

But that wasn't enough. I then took the puzzle and annotated it as the opening to a Moorcockian tale featuring an Eternal Champion solving the puzzle. You can read it here or on GitHub.

We're very serious programmers.

More Wytchery

I made some more improvements to my static site generator, Wytch. The base site now includes some basic blogging functionality, including an Atom feed. There's more to do there, but it's getting closer to being ready for prime time (or as ready as it'll ever be). I still want the generated site to be a better reference for how to use the framework, though.

Poison Pills

I interviewed Joel Hawksley on this week's episode of Dead Code. We talked about the ViewComponent framework, building accessible UI at scale, and how and why GitHub is moving to React. I really enjoyed the conversation, even though I've not exactly been enjoying the new bugs that the React migration has introduced into the GitHub UI. (Let me ⌘-click links, damn it!)

Discipline & Punish

We're veering into the territory of bands like Power Trip today with Cold Steel's debut record, Discipline & Punish. It's not a musical region I spend a lot of time in, but I'm always happy to give standout records a few spins.

Produced by Arthur Rizk (drummer for one of my favourite bands, Eternal Champion, and producer for Power Trip), this record builds energy from start to finish, mixing thrash and even some hip-hop stylings with traditional, brutal breakdowns. This album is clearly six people having a shit ton of fun making great music.