HN user

penpapersw

569 karma

Software developer for hire

Wrote cleancoders.com

Portfolio: https://sdegutis.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/steven-degutis/

GitHub: https://github.com/sdegutis

Email: sbdegutis (gmail)

Posts25
Comments119
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sdegutis.com 8y ago

First thoughts on OCaml

penpapersw
2pts0
sdegutis.com 8y ago

Age of the Polyglot (2014)

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2pts0
sdegutis.com 8y ago

Writing Clearly (2013)

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2pts0
sdegutis.com 8y ago

What I learned in 5 days of writing an experimental website

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sdegutis.com 8y ago

First thoughts on Haskell

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sdegutis.com 8y ago

Passion in your field is overrated

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medium.com 8y ago

Passion for your job is overrated

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github.com 8y ago

Show HN: Leviathan, a Clojure IDE for MacOS

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medium.com 8y ago

How I created a lightning fast hero image, using good old fashioned ingenuity

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2pts0
github.com 8y ago

Show HN: Open source hyper-live chatroom using WebSockets, Node.js, and Vue.js

penpapersw
22pts13
lines.editfight.com 8y ago

Show HN: Social experiment with live textboxes

penpapersw
29pts13
affluentconfidante.com 8y ago

AffluentConfidante.com – Where the 1% can publish their thoughts anonymously

penpapersw
2pts0
affluentconfidante.com 9y ago

Affluent Confidante: Anonymous thoughts of the wealthy, made public

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3pts0
medium.com 9y ago

How I created a $980-per-post social network in just 2 days for $10

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4pts8
itunes.apple.com 9y ago

Show HN: my first iOS “game”, a bubble blowing app using SpriteKit

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Designing a macOS window manager in Racket

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Concatenating Objective-C String Literals

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Easter Eggs and Attention Spans

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

ObjC equivalents to Swift solutions #3: Singletons

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Show HN: Quick List – fun and pretty fun to-do list iOS app

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

ObjC equivalents to Swift solutions #2: Avoiding ObjC method name collisions

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

ObjC equivalents to Swift solutions #1: Avoiding ObjC class name collisions

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Using Objective-C for iOS instead of Swift

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penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Show HN: Accomplish – truly simple todo-list iPhone app

penpapersw
2pts0
penandpapersoftware.com 9y ago

Show HN: Penny Pincher – budgeting app for Mac, with a focus on simplicity

penpapersw
1pts0

This, plus the multiple-cursors package, can save entire minutes off tedious file-renaming operations. (That may not sound like a lot but trust me every second counts when you're just renaming files.)

On the flip side, as someone who's tried to change stacks or IDEs or other software a few times, there's something to be said for already having momentum using existing solutions. Sometimes alternatives can be a little better, but not better enough to justify the time/energy/etc costs of switching. And more often than not, alternative solutions have their own flaws too. I tried three times in the past week to switch my portfolio website (https://sdegutis.com) to using Jekyll or Metalsmith or Hexo, and each time it just didn't prove any better than my own hand-rolled Node.js site generator, and in most cases, it was definitely worse in some ways, at least for the specific requirements I had. So switching tools can be good, if it's legitimately better in some way, and not worse in any other ways. But that doesn't isn't the case as often as we'd like to hope.

That's my same experience with programming. That's kind of what I was getting at in this article actually: that you get better by doing your best and making mistakes. Nothing beats hard-earned experience.

Good point. You're right that passion helped me to gain the experience I have now. But at this point I can't lean on that same passion, I had to find another motivation. I wonder how many people hit this same point and just let themselves fully burn-out instead.

Meh, joke sites like this aren't nearly as prominent as sites for apps, I'd really like a .app TLD instead. That said, the distinction between app and service is blurring a lot, so Spotify and VS Code probably both qualify for .app but one also has a web interface. Everything is confusing, let's just stick to .com

In my experience having switched from using one IDE to another a few times, the difficulty for me is usually that both IDEs do 90% of what I need perfectly (after a few days of tweaking), but the other 10% feels is missing and feels critical, and in particular, neither have the same 10% missing. So I kind of have to ask myself, "which critical features am I okay with giving up?" and I can't decide so I just stick with what I know and have muscle-memory for.

I'm not that optimistic. In my experience, nightmare-level code will be written by the person who wrote it no matter what language they use. Rust doesn't look all that cleaner than C++, just that it has a few more safety guarantees. I'm sure terrible code will be written in it. And I'm sure clean code will be written in it that people without context will call terrible code.

Can confirm. I worked a pretty decent software job with lower pay than others make for the same job for the past 5 years. Could barely afford insurance for my wife and I. We actually had to just give up and not pay for it the first few months of this year before I was laid off, figuring that paying the "fine" for not having health insurance plus whatever unlikely emergency medical costs we might have was cheaper. As soon as I'm laid off, we're on public aid and have the best insurance, and since every job I applies to rejects me, and haven't found any freelance work through sdegutis.com yet, it looks like we'll have a few more months of being able to have better health insurance than I could afford when working a decent programming job. The system is broken and literally ridiculous.

It may not necessarily be in active development, but it's a project I'm very proud of. It's a legitimate text editor built from the ground-up in Objective-C including its own parser and lexer, and the ability to read theme configuration files. I'm very happy with it and I think it stands on its own as an interesting project.

Can't agree with you here. Your comment seemed to be saying "VS Code may be better than Atom in every way, but that doesn't mean we should keep bringing that fact up, or that anyone should switch because of it." It's actually a perfect reason to do both.

"you cannot currently use WSL to run persistent Linux services, daemons, jobs, etc. as background tasks."

Still, this has me wondering if that's the ultimate goal here. Is Microsoft trying to position Windows 10 as a high quality Linux server in the long-term?

Having written Clojure full-time for the past 5 years while writing cleancoders.com has really spoiled me. Clojure's introspective nature makes for some amazingly fast productivity because you can hook up your IDE to the REPL and have a kind of super-REPL, which can really speed up development a ton if you design your system it right. I'm not sure if this project can keep that aspect because of how it compiles to C++. But if it does, then it could really be invaluable in the Clojure ecosystem.

The source is open for you to look at, I haven't decided on further permissions. That's why I felt comfortable using the phrase "open source" :)

Plus it's not a very complicated website. Took me like a day to make. So there's really hardly any use in having it open sourced in the sense that people can use my code. It's probably easier to just write it yourself :D

Sorry, my iPhone keyboard needs a reset badly. Yeah I posted this once last week and it hit FP, and then I made a lot of changes since then and open-sourced it (by popular demand), so I'm linking to the source code now. And admittedly I lost track of posting it in between then and now, so that was totally my mistake. Wow, now that I look at how it's on Show multiple times, that's really embarrassing. Okay good call, I made a mistake; I'll do my best to avoid that mistake in the future. Thanks.

[dead] 9 years ago

Creator here. This started as a 50 line experiment and grew by feature requests. For anyone wondering how it works: The back-end uses Node.js on a single free-tier EC2 server with all custom code except for a canned websockets lib. The front-end uses all custom code except Vue.js for my sanity.

It was originally vanilla JS on the front-end but I changed to Vue.js because it was really inconvenient without something like that. Vue has its own caveats but they're less annoying than nothing. The backend is a single free-tier EC2 server running a single Node.js process, using Websockets. Everything is custom except a canned websocket lib (and Vue).

I didn't realize how new that was. Yeah I rely on the newest of the newest features. I check caniuse.com and if at least 3 major browsers supports a feature then I use it freely. Sometimes that means using stuff that doesn't work on older browsers or IE11.