In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various BSDs. I’d have to specifically install GNU Make, then remember to invoke it (i.e. as gmake) instead of the system’s make.

I’ve since become familiar and comfortable with make’s official specification, and I’ve spend the last year writing strictly portable Makefiles. Not only has are my builds now portable across all unix-like systems, my Makefiles are cleaner and more robust. Many of the common make extensions — conditionals in particular — lead to fragile, complicated Makefiles and are best avoided anyway. It’s important to be able to trust your build system to do its job correctly.

This tutorial should be suitable for make beginners who have never written their own Makefiles before, as well as experienced developers who want to learn how to write portable Makefiles.

Hello! This is part one of a short series of posts on writing a simple raytracer in Rust. I’ve never written one of these before, so it should be a learning experience all around.

Centering in CSS is a pain in the ass. There seems to be a gazillion ways to do it, depending on a variety of factors. This consolidates them and gives you the code you need for each situation.

How to build a 6-node Raspberry Pi "Dramble" cluster.

This is part one of a short series of posts on writing a simple raytracer in Rust. I’ve never written one of these before, so it should be a learning experience all around.

I’ve recently published my first novel The Golden Legacy on Kindle and paperback through Amazon, achieving very professional results. Along the way, I created a process and a couple of tools based exclusively on open source software. Here’s my process.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always been uncomfortable with Jenkins’ apparent statefulness. You set up your Jenkins server, configure it exactly as you want it, then DON’T TOUCH IT.

Fortunately I now have a solution. With a combination of Docker, Python’s Jenkins API modules, the Jenkins job builder Python module, and some orchestration using docker-compose, I can reproduce my Jenkins state at will from code and run it in isolated environments, improving in iterable, track-able steps.

Let’s harness the power of these new media queries to serve an image of the right size based on the device a user views our site on. We’re going to save a lot of bandwidth for the small devices, and serve a beautiful large image for larger ones.

We’ll do that by using the HTML5 picture element and its powerful source tag and media and srcset attributes.

A Microcontainer contains only the OS libraries and language dependencies required to run an application and the application itself. Nothing more.

Rather than starting with everything but the kitchen sink, start with the bare minimum and add dependencies on an as needed basis.

In this essay, I’m going to try to convince parents that it is possible, and may be beneficial, to teach their children to read even while they are babies or toddlers. I also have remarks for researchers throughout. First, I will explain how I taught my own little one, beginning at age 22 months, and introduce some of our methods. Then I will answer various general objections to the notion and practice of teaching tiny tots to read.