Coding

Coding and Decoding

In 2009, Robin Sloan and Tim Carmody invited me to contribute an entry to a speculative course catalog. (The whole thing is…

Between November and December 2012, I built SoundScout as a way to discover up-and-coming musicians on SoundCloud. What started as a simple command-line script rapidly evolved into a Ruby app running on Sinatra, powered by two gems, deployed to Heroku, fueled by Sidekiq workers managed by a…

Notes on what it’s like to write code.

I woke up this morning and pulled my open laptop onto the mountainous comforter piled over my knees. Eyes blinking against the sunlight, I squinted at the Terminal window on my screen. Before email, before Twitter, before…

Notes on what it’s like to write code.

Today, I raced back into Ruby’s arms.

It’s hard to believe, but the end of the semester is drawing near, and so CS50 (the intro to computer science course I’m taking at Harvard) is winding down, too. Well…

Notes on what it’s like to write code.

The past month has been a quick, rocky plummet further into C. With every problem set, I feel like I’m hanging on for dear life. My eyes go wide as I read the specification; a few hours later, I’ll have solved one small part of…

Notes on what it’s like to write code.

It’s late (or early) — a bit past 2am on September 27, 2012. I just submitted my third CS50 problem set of the semester. It was titled “pset2,” (since, of course, the psets are zero-indexed), and marked two weeks of progress in C.

This year — my sixth on campus, and my last — I decided it was finally time to take CS50, Harvard’s introductory computer science course. CS50 lectures happen twice a week in Sanders Theatre, a ridiculously majestic setting. Yet for all intents and purposes (and…

Notes on what it’s like to write code.

CS50 started last week. It’s the introductory computer science class I never took as an undergrad, so I’m beyond excited to be taking it now. We learned all about psuedocode and binary and ASCII and Scratch. I watched both lectures…