assert_not magic?

Ryan Palo 
def test_code_isnt_magic
code = [:ruby, :python, :javascript, :html, :css, :bash]
assert_not code.any? { |language| language.magic? }
end

# A programming blog by Ryan Palo
Ruby
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2025 Update

May 3, 2025 Buy me a coffee Buy me a coffee

It’s been (checks last post date)… oh no. It’s been a lot of time since my last post. In my defense, since then, I’ve switched industries entirely, and I got a job at Flashpoint as a software engineer. Then I got promoted to Senior SWE. Add to that that we’ve had two more babies since that last post! Babies, as everyone knows, are a cute and symbiotic larval form of energy vampire, and my extra gas at the beginning and end of the day available for blog-writing has been effectively nonexistent.

But not today. Today I have unlimited energy. Baby #3 is sleeping through the night, I woke up naturally, and I’m king of the world!

Or, at least I have enough energy to update the Ruby version and get an update post for my blog out. So here are the dev-related updates:

What I’m Working On

Mostly I’m working on work and keeping babies alive. But when I do get some extra energy, I’ve been really interested in things related to programming languages themselves.

  • I recently worked my way through Guido’s PEG Parser Series
  • I’m still determined to finish Crafting Interpreters because it’s incredible. I’ve been working through it for a while, but I recently got the print version because I figured I should definitely support the author, given everything I’ve learned from it so far.
  • I picked up Writing a C Compiler which is another incredible book. I’m about a third of the way through this one too. I’ve got a C Compiler, as long as the only data type you want to use is int. The rest of the book has two parts: adding more passes and optimizations to the compiler, and adding more data types. My goal is to get through both.
  • My teammates at work recently shared several “build your own X”-style blog posts and listings that I’ll hopefully have time and energy to work on, but I’m trying to pace myself and not rack up too much of a backlog.
  • I’d like to do a refresh of my blog site, but I didn’t want to let that be a blocker to me getting more posts out, so I’ll get to that when I get to it.
  • I made the switch to Neovim as my primary editor about 6 months ago, so learning a lot more on that front, as well as accidentally learning Lua has been fun. Lua rules–it’s such a happy little language.

Some of My Goals/Interests

  • My GitHub squares are sad, and that’s mostly because my hobby dev has just been local and all of my dev for work has been on a private company git instance. So I’d like to get back to building and learning more in public.
  • I’m buckling down and focusing on getting much better at Golang, alongside the continuous Python learning and growth.
  • I’d like to find a way to share the buckets of stuff that I’ve learned at my fancy-pants dev job while still keeping proprietary stuff proprietary. So I’m going to think a little harder and work on some posts about some more general skills and tools on that front. But trust me, there’s a lot of smart people at Flashpoint, and I’ve learned a lot from them.
  • Although I’m not the captain of the AI train, I know that being able to use AI tools effectively is its own skillset, so my goal is to test out some AI code assistants and see if there are areas that I can fit them into my workflow while still keeping code quality up and maintaining my constant growth and learning.

Some Other Stuff

  • There are some really cool PEP’s and features coming soon to Python that I’m really excited to get to see and use in the wild (PI-version 3.14 coming soon, let’s gooooo)

Like my stuff? Have questions or feedback for me? Want to mentor me or get my help with something? Get in touch! To stay updated, subscribe via RSS