For the longest time, I was a Vagrant holdout at work. All projects we worked on would have getting a Vagrantfile and Chef cookbook set up as a first step, but I avoided using them. It seemed like something was always broken with any given app’s Vagrant setup. vagrant up rarely just worked for me, which was supposedly the promise of using Vagrant + Chef: a consistent development environment that put all developers on a level playing field with each other as well as with the production server environment.

For the past few days, I’ve been trying to create a Facebook application for interacting with Github. I hoped to spend my time mainly on the Github portion, figuring out how to post wall posts on Facebook about recent Github activity, etc. However, I’ve instead argued with the various Facebook APIs. I started out using PHP with no framework but quickly switched to CakePHP after I realized things were going to get hairy. CakePHP was okay for a while until I hit the roadblock of not being able to load any page but the index… Every sub-page I tried to create produced 404 errors, which no one else seemed to have (or at least document), so I said ‘screw it’ and switched to Rails.

This essay was originally written for my graduate-level programming languages class.

Recently for work, I’ve had cause to write functionality so that a certain chunk of a form can be inserted again, over and over, by the user. The form involves data about course equivalencies between schools, and the user might need to submit data for multiple courses a student has taken. Hence, the user needs to be able to add extra course sections on the fly, as they’re necessary.

If you’ve browsed through many personal sites at all, you’ve probably seen some of the following things that make me personally cringe. I don’t understand why they’re so trendy, since they don’t improve a site in the least.

One of the easiest ways to keep your code easy to update, read, and debug is to keep it neat. That means indentation, documentation, consistency, and logic need to be applied. These are basics in any programming class, and they are just as applicable with coding HTML as they are with C++ or any other programming language.