Let's Build a Codec!

[jducoeur]

Well, that's kind of neat. Rally Health (my dayjob) just relaunched its company Engineering Blog, with a new article by me.

It's strictly for the programmers, showing how to build a Redis serializer/deserializer using typeclasses in Scala. If you're interested in how programming works in a more modern way, I recommend checking it out -- it's a good illustration of how this technique (which came from Haskell, but is now central to Scala and spreading to other languages) works. Questions more than welcomed here: I enjoy teaching this stuff...

Comments

[drwex]

My first question is "why is the page entirely blank if I visit with Javascript off?"

Like, I'm sure that's not your area but argh accessibility at least?

My second question is - do you always use both names in a professional context? I wasn't away you did that.

[jducoeur]

My first question is "why is the page entirely blank if I visit with Javascript off?"

Like, I'm sure that's not your area but argh accessibility at least?

Huh. Excellent question -- must be an issue with the new CMS system we're now using for the blog. (Heaven knows, this is by no means the first problem I've had with it.) I'll bring it up with the team: thanks for pointing this out.

My second question is - do you always use both names in a professional context? I wasn't away you did that.

It varies from job to job. I've been pretty inconsistent over the years, but I started using Justin professionally in my first job out of college (I was one of two Marks on a thee-person team, so it was easier), and have often done so since.

In this particular case, I'm trying to help Rally get more involved with the wider Scala world, and I'm known primarily as Justin in the Scala community. (Since Justin has always been my online handle, and my main involvement with that community has been online.) So here I'm using Justin because of Scala, and Mark because of LinkedIn; both are somewhat relevant.

(I've always been extremely open that they are synonyms, so it's not exactly giving anything away. In non-geek circles, I describe Justin as a nom de plume.)

[jducoeur]

I brought this up at work, and we did some experiments, and it seems to be working for us -- it's not as *pretty* with JS turned off, but it seems to be entirely functional. Would you be willing to help figure out the recipe for why this broke for you? (Eg, what browser you were using and so on.)

[drwex]

Sure thing. I'm using Chrome with ScriptBlock installed (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scriptblock/hcdjknjpbnhdoabbngpmfekaecnpajba)

By default it blocks scripts on all sites and I maintain a whitelist for it to run scripts; everything else I give temp permission for. So your site appeared blank at first, then looked fine when I told ScriptBlock to allow your site.

[jducoeur]

Interesting -- so the implication is that ScriptBlock is more rigorous in some way than Chrome's own "disable JS" function is. Okay, I'll look into that -- thanks!