whateverthing.com

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Lately I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out about technology and even the world in general. This summer has been a bit of a pounding in a few ways, at least if you follow the news. And I do follow the news - entirely too much. The world seems to be trending to a dark place.

Again.

But on the bright side, there’s one place that has always been dark and foreboding. No matter how bad the world gets, this one place can’t get any worse than it already is.

I speak, of course, of forgotten code. Not dead code, not mere legacy code, but rather, code that runs every day yet hasn’t been looked at by a developer in years. Often, the code was written in a hurry using the fastest time-to-implement solution available. Sometimes by a very inexperienced developer.

All of that means one thing: it could be vulnerable.

Changes are afoot: I’ve been given the opportunity to learn Ruby on Rails on a project at work. It’s been a while since I started a new language, and my last attempt at Python kind of fizzled, so I’m hoping that Ruby will be easier to pick up.

So Far, So Good

I’ve had some exposure to Ruby in the past, such as with Puppet modules and Capistrano deployments, but until now I haven’t really concentrated on understanding the language itself. Compared to PHP, it’s lean and clean. I’m definitely liking what I’m seeing.

Recently I had a side project that needed Next/Previous pagination buttons. Using Twig, a PHP-based template rendering engine I like, I was able to hack together a quick and dirty solution. Emphasis on the dirty - but, even dirty code can teach you something.

In this case, we're going to learn a few Twig tricks: advanced for loops, array merging, and custom macros.

Let’s say you’re building a mobile app in Silex (a PHP microframework), and you want to add location-based search to your features. You’ve got a data set with a bunch of street addresses, like this CSV that lists all facilities in British Columbia that are licensed to sell or produce liquor.

A quick example:

Not that I’m thinking of creating a “nearest booze” app. I’ve got better things on my mind. Anyway, that’s off topic. Uh oh! Now I’ve decided to make the app.

I’m going to call it DrinkyDrinkyThing.