Mark is currently the tech lead for the BBC News Frameworks team; the author of Pro Vim (published by Apress) and Programming in Clojure (self published with LeanPub)
Mark’s technical interests are wide and varied: *nix tools, Clojure, Go, Rust, JRuby and functional programming. Along with promoting solid object-oriented principles, microservices architecture, AWS services and distributed/concurrent systems design.
Outside of the tech world Mark plays guitar, practices a myriad of martial arts (jiu-jitsu, ishinryu karate and kickboxing) and is a pretty mean ballroom dancer.
Most web developers use a build tool of some sort nowadays. I’m not refering to continuous integration software like Jenkins CI (a very popular build system), but the lower-level software it uses to actually acquire dependencies and construct your applications with.
There is a dizzying array of options to choose from: Apache Ant (XML-based), Rake (Ruby-based), Grunt (JS-based), Gulp (JS-based), Broccoli (JS-based), NPM (JS-based), Good ol’ shell scripts (although no real orchestration around it). The build tool I want to look at in more detail here though is the granddaddy of them all: Make.
Read more…
Ruby is a great language. It was designed to foster happiness and productivity in developers, all the while providing tools that are effective and yet focused on simplicity.
Read more…
In this article, we’ll go over the concepts and techniques required to build a command line tool using Node.js and PhantomJS. Building a command line tool enables you to automate a process that would otherwise take a lot longer.
Read more…