Daniel Nitsikopoulos

• Late one this week on account of a busy weekend!
• I was in Sydney on Wednesday this week to attend the first ever Ruby in Common! Ruby conf is one of my favourite times of year, and I missed out on attending this year — but this made up for ...

• What a mixed week! This week was bookended with 2 pretty wild events.
• On Monday night, I flew in to Melbourne in preparation to go see Blink-182 on Tuesday evening.
• On Tuesday, we managed to do a run through of a major database upgrade in a...

I was pairing with a colleague this afternoon at work on trying to test an action in Hanami 2 where we explicitly needed to read the body of the request.

The action looked something like this:

class MyAction < Action
    before_action ...

More camels and oasis-es, less cards.

In this puzzle, we're using our trusty Oasis And Sand Instability Sensor — OASIS — to analyse our surroundings.

The OASIS produces a history for each value, and we need to extrapolate the next valu...

Another fun one!

Today's puzzle had us navigating a sandstorm. Our map, a set of directions, through what looked like a graph.

Starting at AAA, we want to get to ZZZ following the R, then L item each iteration — starting from R again i...

Day 7 saw us playing cards, on camels — camel cards!

Camel cards are like poker. But simpler, so you can play it while on a camel.

The hand-rules are similar to Poker, but with a few changes — which is ace, because I have no idea what the ...

Catchup time! 😅 Time for day 6 — on day 11.

Today's puzzle has us racing boats. But not any boats, toy boats that are wound up with the hold of a button. The longer the button is held, the higher their speed. So holding the button for 3...

Please, my CPU, it needs help!

A classic entry for AoC, in which there is a brute-force option that will melt any CPU.

Today's puzzle was fun! But also frustrating.

The setup is you need to work out the best place to plant some seeds....

My favourite so far!

Inspired by some folks at work, I decided to try and do this as functionally as possible.

Apparently there are some similarities with past puzzles, but I, for the life of me, cannot remember any of the puzzles of years...

And so the painful puzzles begin!

Today's puzzle revolved around an ascii schematic and we were tasked with parsing it and finding adjacent elements in the map.

These ones always trip me up for some reason — and I think it's becaus...

As I was building out the admin area of this blog, I wanted to make sure only authenticated people could hop in an edit things.

The first iteration of this, was based on HTTP BasicAuth. To get this to work, I built a small module that uses ...

Onwards! To day 2.

(at least until the rest of the end-of-year things start getting in the way — which normally happens at around day 6)

Started reading this one thinking we'd be getting in to probabilities — thankfully that's not ...

Advent of Code is one of my favourite times of year. Partly for the puzzles, and partly because it's a sign the year is winding up. Like 24 ways to impress your friends and UXmas before it, Advent of Code is an advent calendar, where eac...

• I made a couple of updates to this site this weekend. Mainly some behind the scenes things to update Hanami to 2.1.0rc2 and to bring some of the core pieces in line with what will be generated when 2.1.0 ships! A couple of highlights:

  • Mo...

The weather was slightly better this week — no need for busting out the space heater at least!

The last few weeks have seen a steady increase in halloween decorations around the neighbourhood. Nothing crazy and over the top, but some pretty...

Over the many years that I have been working with Ruby, I have never really learned to use a debugger, and really only lean on tools like Pry to start a REPL session at a particular line in some Ruby code. From there, I reach for Ruby's ...

• Regular length week this week ;)
• I have been adding some behind the scenes features to this blog. Up until now, I have been using a handful of micropub clients, and some Ruby scripts to publish and manage posts. This has all been working we...

I've been using Obsidian for a little while now. At first, it was largely just a replacement for Notes.app, like Ulysses before it, I preferred it purely because I could see the markdown files that it was saving. As time went on though, ...

• This week, the temperature has cooled way down in Canberra. I've had to double up on long sleeve shirts some days to stay warm, and some of the leaves on our trees are starting to turn 🍂
• I've been playing through the new "Ligh...

• I've been listening to the latest The Adventure Zone campaign, Steeplechase . Based on the Blades in the Dark tabletop RPG, it seems to be a much faster paced campaign as compared to some of the other DnD based campaigns. So far I am qu...

• Nintendo dropped a surprise release of Metroid Prime Remastered on us this week! I remember reading, and re-reading all of the promotional material of the original when it was announced out in ~2001. Then being amazed by the detail in Samu...

• 📲 New blog, who this? I have been re-building this site with Hanami & Tailwind, following the W3C's Micropub spec (mainly so I can leverage plethora of amazing compatible clients out there to write posts like this).
• Since the enshit...

I often get asked about recommendations for resources to learn Ruby (and how to program, generally). This list is intended to catalogue the various resources I have shared over the years and be an easy reference point for future learners.

I have a couple of small hobby apps that were on Heroku's free tier (RIP) that I have now moved over to Fly.io. Fly.io has a migrate from Heroku process for Rails apps, but as far as I could see, not for any Ruby app. So I had to do thin...