Sandeep C

On Lisp

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have a fascination with Lisp / lisp like languages. This started way back when I joined the Emacs religion, part of the initiatiion is to configure your IDE via macros! Much later I tried creating (and failed to maintain) a emacs package that would interact with Bugzilla.

Another experiment was to use a Sawfish Window Manager , which is highly configurable via a lisp like programming language rep. This was the early days of Linux desktop, with a plethora of window managers.

Beginning Elm

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000

I recently stumbled upon Elm, a functional reactive programming. I literally spent evenings and nights for the next 2 weeks pouring over tutorials and videos learning Elm.

I found these resources really helpful:

I ported over a search widget to Elm (from KnockoutJS) and that helped cement much of what I learned. The backend is written in Mojolicious. I even published my first CPAN module , Mojolicious::Plugin::AssetPack::Pipe::ElmLang - a pipeline to compile Elm source files into Javascript!

Key-Value-Coding in PHP

Fri, 05 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Objective-C provides a very concise way of accessing values of any object (that supports NSKeyValueCoding protocol).

Here’s my attempt at implementing a simple KVC type accessor for PHP arrays.

/**
 * value_for_keypath
 *
 * returns value at the given key path in an multi-dimensional array (map)
 *
 * @param $array
 * @param $path string , each path element is separted by a dot (.)
 */
function value_for_keypath($input, $path)
{
	$keys = explode( ".", $path );
	$tmp_val = $input;

	foreach ($keys as $key) {
		if (isset( $tmp_val[$key] )) {
			$tmp_val = $tmp_val[$key];
		} else {
			return null;
		}
	}

	return $tmp_val;
}

Eg:

db migration tool

Mon, 02 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability.

– Edsger W. Dijkstra

One of the common problem with web-based application is how to handle database migration. Often times the answer to this is to use the migration tool that comes with the ORM the system relies on.

In the past, as the system grew to use multiple layers each with its own runtime / language / ORM , I was forced to maintain db migration in one of the layer. Thus I came to realize that an ORM agnostic db migration tool would be the ideal approach.

Friendly Interactive SHell

Tue, 15 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Continuing my blog theme on repl’s whats more appropriate than a blog about shells! Thus far I have been using zsh with oh my zsh. In itself zsh is good however it had gotten noticeably slow. I attribute this to the git plugin.

Enter Friendly Interactive SHell! In simple words - fish:zsh::zsh:sh.

I no longer need to muck around config files, fish_config is a shining example of how CLI applications should handle configuration. Here’s a screenshot of fish_config

A Wordpress shell

Thu, 10 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

At The Mighty my work involves dealing with wordpress extensively. Having a php shell with access to the full wordpress libraries was something I was looking for. I tried couple of php cli hacks before I stumbled on WP CLI. Now getting a php cli with wordpress is as simple as

$ wp shell

As a side note – I created a simple docker container to run wordpress with few extras, here.

A REPL for your Mojolicious app

Tue, 06 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Read-Eval-Print loop (repl) is a lifesaver, you can quickly hack a script with one. However a repl with full access to your application is vastly more powerful.

Mojolicious is a next generation web framework for the perl programming language. There are many things to love about Mojolicious , ease of use is one of them.

Perl always came with a simple repl but Devel::REPL took it to the next level. Devel::REPL allows you to tailor the environemt and the following code snippet shows you how to add a interactive shell to your Mojolicious app quickly and simply.

Chromebook as a developer machine

Sat, 01 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

(rebuilding lost blog posts the hard way)

You can use crouton to install a chroot jail and then you are free to apt-get install any library that’s compiles to armv7.

I have a Samsung Chromebook and I have installed the GAE python sdk , emacs and clozure common lisp for development.

Its super easy to set this up:

Enter developer mode, for Samsung Chromebook follow this procedure.
Download Crouton
Ctrl-Alt-T to open terminal , type shell to open a bash shell and run:

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A brief list of facts about me (possibly outdated):

I favor Go & Javascript
I love functional programming
Life long list learner

Me elsewhere

https://github.com/csandeep - All my code
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepchayapathi - My LinkedIn Profile
https://www.flickr.com/photos/csandeep - My Photos