Posts

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 3)

The last we left our pure-CSS tree component, it could render both horizontally oriented as well as vertically oriented; however, each orientation only worked in one direction—the horizontal tree only rendered left-to-right and the vertical tree only rendered top-to-bottom. What if we wanted to render trees in the inverse orientations?

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 2)

In our last post, we built a simple pure-CSS tree from a nested list. That tree was horizontally oriented, but what if we wanted a vertically oriented tree? Today, let’s build that.

Maintaining Binary State in CSS

I really like CSS, and I think of it as a programming language. It does not, however, have many of the utilities of other programming languages. As a result, many programmers quickly turn to Javascript whenever they need client-side interactivity. For whatever reason, this is a habit that I never picked up; in fact, I picked up the complete opposite habit—whenever I need some particular client-side interactivity, I first try to implement it in pure CSS.

As you might imagine, this doesn’t always work out. It has, however, led me to some pure CSS solutions that I quite like.¹ In this post, I want to outline one technique that I use time and time again to make more pure CSS solutions possible.

Building Pure CSS Trees (part 1)

Have you ever wanted to represent some hierarchical data on a webpage as a tree? In this series of posts, we are going to build a CSS-only solution for rendering hierarchical trees.

The Lifecycle of a Web Request

As a part of a recent job application process, I was asked a few general questions pertaining to software development. I thought I would share the questions and my answers here on my blog.

The Question #

A user browses to some URL in their browser. Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate the lifecycle of this request and what happens in the browser, over the network, on servers, and in the Rails application before the request completes.

What is MVC?

As a part of a recent job application process, I was asked a few general questions pertaining to software development. I thought I would share the questions and my answers here on my blog.

The Question #

Please describe in as much detail as you think is appropriate what the MVC design pattern is, what the responsibilities of the Model, View, and Controller are, both in general and in Rails specifically, and what the benefits of this separation are. Also touch on how the Concern and Service patterns fit into this.

An interlude with minitest/autorun

An interlude in a series of posts laying out the process, step by step, of building an interpreter in Ruby for working with propositional logic. In this small post, we take our hand-rolled "tests" and move the code into an executable test script with minitest/autorun.

Proper Propositional Logic

The second in a series of posts laying out the process, step by step, of building an interpreter in Ruby for working with propositional logic. In this second post, we expand the interpreter to handle the full range of valid expressions in classical propositional logic.

Starting Simple

The first in a series of posts laying out the process, step by step, of building an interpreter in Ruby for working with propositional logic. In this first post, we build an interpreter for working with simple logical expressions and dig into the specifics of the parts of an interpreter as well as the basics of propositional logic.

On Antinomies and Paradoxes

Should the central tenets of Christian theology be best understood as antinomies, or paradoxes, or both?