our notebook

Meet Yanick Champoux
Emal Sakwall (@zigadore) & Yanick Champoux (@yenzie)
july 16th, 2015

Tiger Sloth - image by Brett Brayman

Welcome to the first in our series of interviews with people in the Infinity community. Approximately monthly, we’ll introduce you to a member of the Infinity team, an Infinity partner, or general person of interest. Our first interview is with our own Yanick Champoux.

Meet Yanick. A damn fine man. A programmer extraordinaire. A comic book writer. He is a native of Montréal currently living in Ottawa, Canada. The man contains multitudes.

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Bread::Board, part II: Beyond the DSL
Yanick Champoux (@yenzie)
july 9th, 2015

Welcome to the second installment of our Bread::Board tutorials. In the previous article, we've covered what type of situation calls for Bread::Board, and we had a high-level overview of how to use it. In this installment, we'll begin to dig deeper into the inner workings of the framework. More specifically, we'll look beyond the DSL we used thus far for our examples, and learn how to manually create the underlying objects of a Bread::Board application.

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Rakudobrew
Brian Wisti (@brianwisti)
june 2nd, 2015

Perl 6 will be ready for production in 2015, according to Perl creator Larry Wall. At least, that's what he said during his FOSDEM 2015 talk. This news reminded me that it has been quite a while since I tried anything interesting with Perl 6. I decided to spend my weekend installing and playing with Rakudo, the primary Perl 6 implementation.

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Taking CSS Animations to the Danger Zone
Will Hutchinson (@tetowill)
april 8th, 2015

Lately I've been wanting to experiment a little more with CSS animations. I already use them for small effects, but to really get to know something, I need a project. A while back I was watching one of my favorite cartoons, Archer, and as the title sequence was rolling I realized, "this would make an awesome CSS animation project!"

Whenever you try to recreate something, it's best to study the original. A quick search led me to Art of the Title a site dedicated to title sequences. Lucky for me, they have the Archer title sequence posted for our viewing pleasure. Have a look at it to see the sequence I'm building towards.

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A Dashboard for My Apartment
Shawn M Moore (@sartak)
march 6th, 2015

I originally bought my iPad back when tablets were becoming a fad. I had expected to use it for everything from reading ebooks to playing elaborate new games. But no, it has been sitting idle, collecting dust, for years. Even the promise of a shared, coffee-table web browser has fallen flat. Whenever there's a task to be done, I instead reach for my laptop or my phone. After all, as phones get larger and more capable, and laptops get lighter and extend their battery life, the sweet spot that tablets offer gets squeezed out from both above and below. So for the past year or so, my usage has been limited to ordering food online with friends, passing the iPad down the couch. But now I've finally figured out the perfect job for it. I've mounted it right next to my front door. My previously-unused iPad now serves as a dashboard and control panel for my apartment.

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Grandma, can you pause the story?
Tracey Shirley
march 3rd, 2015

I remember smiling to myself when my granddaughter asked me to “pause” while reading her a bedtime story. To her, the language was appropriate. She has only known a world where you have the power to “pause” by simply pushing a button.

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Super-duper-happy Nancy-based API… as a Windows Service
David Knaack (@AC0KG)
november 3rd, 2014

Nancy is a lightweight framework for building HTTP-based services on .NET and Mono. The goal of the framework is to stay out of the way as much as possible and provide a "super-duper-happy-path" to all interactions. This approach to sensible defaults and conventions means that it is very easy to write a stand-alone self-hosted web site or API that runs as a desktop application. In this post, I'm going to discuss the equivalent happy-path for deploying such an application as a Windows Service.

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Shellshock in the Wild
Mike Eldridge
october 2nd, 2014

The recent disclosure of a critical security flaw in the widely used bash command-line shell for Unix operating systems sent many technology professionals scrambling to update their systems. We were certainly among them.

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