RSpec: Quiet a socketry/console logger in a test

You are writing a test. It raises a well-known exception, and you check for it. Suddenly, there’s log output, since you are working with some concurrent task. Your mood sinks. What’s the way to disable this library’s logging? In this case, I was kindly helped by the library’s author. Quiet a Console.logger in an RSpec …

Allow Leslie Lamport to explain to you what TLA+ is

Sat down with a good friend who’s in math + economic history. He’d taken me to school at the gym, introducing the Thai boxing exercise “kick the heavy bag” 45-seconds-per-leg. Brutal. Loud. I can perhaps recommend it. Afterwards at Nobes, enjoying a traditional meal of potatoes, gravy and vegan kålpudding, he asked me whether math …

Ruby feature: Regular Expression replace once

About a year ago, programmer Tony Arcieri posed a question on the Ruby language bug tracker:  Why was Thread.exclusive deprecated? Among the answers to this question, Shyouhei Urabe’s one of the tersest feature descriptions yet: “we already have such thing, to some extent at least”: /#{@mutex=Mutex.new}/o The pair of slashes are Regular Expression delimiters. A Regular …

Malmö Coders’ Book Club

Quick report on Malmö coders’ book club: This was the initial sitting, and we were 7 people around the table. One academic, two leads, and four software engineers. We spoke English, since we were an international crowd. At least three physical notebooks full of written notes were out, and the conversation was started based on …