Last week I attended Smashing Conference, which is apparently a conference of somewhat long standing in the field of front-end development, or so I am told. I opted for the online version, rather than in person, because it was cheaper, and because I was out of town on the conference days. So I logged in […]
Author Archives: Mark Eaton
In which we puzzle over what is a “framework”
As I move more of our website’s code to the idiom of Vue.js, I wonder how to best explain this to my colleagues. Vue is commonly referred to as a “framework”, but this is not super enlightening to a non-programmer. It can be a bit hard to explain what Vue does, because it deals in […]
Posted in javascript, vue
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In which, undeterred, I try to figure out what to write next
One never-ending challenge for faculty is finding things to write about. The problem is especially acute for those on the tenure track, but it really applies to almost anyone in a faculty role. Moreover, coming up with the wrong idea can be a real setback. It’s possible to spend months working on a topic before […]
Posted in research
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From the archive
I recently dug up an old paper about indexing that I never published. It’s pretty brief, but I think the main argument still stands, so I’ve shared it on CUNY Academic Works. Maybe of interest if you’re interested in indexing, or the politics of software. Here are the details: Title: Automation, Abstraction and Building It […]
Fall is here
The fall semester is starting this week, so it’s a natural inflection point in the academic year. Our departmental website committee wrapped up our summer weekly meetings last week, committed all the code we’d written over the past few months, and made it live. Things are going to shift dramatically in September. I’ll be spending […]
Posted in eresources, homepage
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Time
Programming around dates, times, and timezones is painful. I’ve done this in Python and in JavaScript and it was miserable either way. It’s due to the complexities of time that we mostly ignore in our day to day lives. We are able to do this because we generally are not in multiple timezones at the […]
Posted in javascript, python, time
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Languages and idiom
This summer, I’ve been going to a French speaking meetup in Crown Heights on Friday evenings. It’s a nice to end the week by simply sitting outside and chatting in French. It’s got me thinking about natural and programming languages. My ideas on this are probably very naive, so please forgive me, and feel free […]
The last days of the Open Journal Matcher
Yesterday I took the Open Journal Matcher offline. It had a good run of just over two years. I was reaching the limits of my comfort level maintaining this kind of production system. Technical debt had built up, and my enthusiasm for maintaining the project had ebbed. My hope is that someone will pick up […]
Posted in journal recommender
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