Tim Ruffles' blog

Funny once ain’t enough: generative AI will not replace creatives

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In the “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” someone explaining humour to a computer mentions that most jokes are “funny once”. Unoriginality is a deadly sin for wit, but that's true to an important degree for all creative work. If an image, advert, film or piece…

Should governments give citizens compute?

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 00:00:00 +0000

If governments provided citizens some compute some interesting things could happen. Basic utilities like email could be access via running open-source software for free on your free government compute and storage, rather than by advertising funded, ‘you ar…

Github's shrine to focus

Sun, 12 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Hearing Github [is closing](https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/09/github-lays-off-10-and-goes-fully-remote/) its offices made me want to share my favourite thing about their HQ. Out of all the

When is a slice of any not a slice of any?

Tue, 11 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000

When is `[]any` not `[]any` in Go? When generics get involved!

Vim quickfix hack for IntelliJ

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Vim’s quickfix mode is very useful during complex refactors. For instance, I wrote an AST-based tool to identify locations that needed a manual refactor. But how could I navigate through all the matches to perform it?

The Object Compromise

Sat, 23 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve observed a pattern I call the ‘object compromise’. It's an architecture which emerges when its authors believe aspects of traditional object-oriented programming are harmful, but are not using a fully functional language[1](#langs) (and don't wish to …

Server-Side Rendering is a Thiel Truth

Sat, 25 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000

I recently pondered how I'd answer [Peter Thiel's](https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1478492-what-important-truth-do-very-few-people-agree-with-you) interview question if my answer had to relate to software:

A pandemic of bubble maps

Sun, 29 Mar 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Besides COVID-19, we have an outbreak of bubble maps failing to communicate data effectively:

Go interfaces, the tricky parts

Fri, 27 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Does this Go snippet compile, and if not, why?

In browser JS to C compiler

Fri, 19 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

You can now [try out](https://timruffles.github.io/js-to-c/) my JS to C compiler in the browser! Edit the JS code on the left, and see the resulting C code on the right.

Representing JS Values in C

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

When implementing JS a primary decision is how to represent JS values - the objects, numbers and strings that make up JS programs. Since I'm targeting C, there's a lot of flexibility in how to do this.

The Weirdest JavaScript syntax

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I have bad news. The following is valid, spec compliant JS syntax:

Compiling JS control-flow to C

Sat, 16 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Let's look at how I implemented JS's `if` statement in the [`js-to-c`](https://github.com/timruffles/js-to-c/) compiler. First, let's write a JS `if`:

Architecture for a JS to C compiler

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

The basic data-flow of compilation looks like this:

Compiling Interpreted Languages

Tue, 29 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I think a few years back I’d have been confused by the concept of compiling JavaScript. I would have assumed that compiled and interpreted languages were fundamentally different beasts. Reading [SICP](https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/index…

Writing a Javascript to C compiler

Mon, 28 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000

I’m writing a [JavaScript to C compiler](https://github.com/timruffles/js-to-c), and I'd like to share the journey. Why? Figuring out how things ‘really work’ is a deep itch for me. I’m a self-taught developer. Throughout my infatuation with coding I’ve be…

Improving Sapiens' timeline page

Tue, 16 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yuval Harari's book [_Sapiens_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind) includes a timeline before the text. Take a look at it below and consider what you notice in the data with a quick glance:

Real-time the easy way with EventSource

Sat, 09 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

When people think real-time their thoughts immediately leap to web-sockets. For many use-cases there exists a more productive approach: [server-sent-events](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Server-sent_events) & [EventSource](https://develo…

Directive communication in Angular

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Directives in Angular are great. One challenge people face, however, is getting them to interact without creating too much, or too little, coupling.

Turn anything into an ng-model with ngModelController

Thu, 23 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Few people realise that `ng-model` can turn any interactive component into a fully-working input for use in Angular's `form` system. This saves you a heap of time in reinventing wheels - very often I see 100s of lines of codes in controllers managing state…

Keeping easy things easy

Tue, 19 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

There's a trend in front-end development to want to use the 'best practice' tools in every project, no matter the size or complexity. This seems to be a way to signal (to ourselves as much as others) competence through tribal membership: i.e I use cool too…

Infographics aren't just pretty pictures

Tue, 11 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

What does the below company (Thames Water) seem to be spending the most on?

Scraping data with the browser

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Chrome's developer tools make it easy to scrape data from web pages. I'll demonstrate this by grabbing a list of ISO country codes and country names from Wikipedia.

Is anybody you know democratic?

Thu, 31 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I don’t think I’ve ever met a democratic person. The democracies we live in are representative, but I think even people who couldn’t be happier with the system would agree: they’re restricted democracies.

Own your content

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 00:00:00 +0000

You should own the things you create online. Whenever you use a service like Twitter, Medium or Flickr, remember you're giving away your content.

Land-grabbing the Noosphere

Tue, 10 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

Abandoned projects are land-grabs that hurt everybody.

Twedar - machine learning side project

Sun, 08 Sep 2013 00:00:00 +0000

[Twedar](http://twedar.herokuapp.com) is a little side-project I built about two years back with [Philip Cole](https://twitter.com/philip_cole). It's a live-updated Twitter search, with the power to filter out any noise from unrelated subjects that match y…

Playing with ES6 generators to make a Maybe in Javascript

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 00:00:00 +0000

New project: SidekickJS - Javascript code quality tool

Sun, 12 May 2013 00:00:00 +0000

I've started work on a new potential startup: [SidekickJS, a Javascript code-quality tool](https://www.sidekickjs.com). It analyses your Javascript repository for basic Javascript issues, repetition, complexity and alerts you of changes. It's intended to r…

Blurring the stock market

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

High frequency trading (HFT) makes money from tiny changes in stock prices. It's purely speculative - it does not involve consideration of the fundamentals of the companies/bonds involved. Traders ["compete on a basis of speed with other high-frequency tra…

How much iOS can you learn in a day?

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000

The Faith Machine

Sat, 10 Sep 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Is being unreasonable reasonable? Certainly if you can only be happy with some amount of unreasonable beliefs, and you value happiness to any degree (and really, who doesn't?).

The Luzhin Defence, Nabokov

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Nabakov's book is split into three - a lonely child's view of the world, an entrancing account of life as a chess genius, and his post-breakdown decline. It is equally about each part, and each has plenty of observations that ring true.

Exambuff - Open Sourced Startup

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Rails 3 Asset Pipeline in a minute

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Here's a quick summary of Rails 3's asset pipeline if you're already confident with Rails/Ruby, and some pointers on getting it working on Heroku.

Ruby's === equality operator

Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby’s ```===``` operator is often called the ‘case equality’ operator, which is indicative of where it is used, but not how it works. I realised I hadn’t quite grokked the how when I read [Jon Canady's post](http://joncanady.com/2010/07/05/switching-on-ob…

My first experiments with R

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000

I started to use R for a maths course at the Open University, and thought I'd jot down my initial progress. R is pretty ugly to come to as a programming language: as far as I can tell, there is absolutely no naming convention at all. Luckily there's a REPL…