Bryan Bierce. Software Engineer.

Lazy Evaluation Rocks

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Native Observers. How Cool!

Today I learned about a nifty little language feature in Swift that had somehow escaped my attention in these last weeks of exploration. The feature is called Property Observers and you can find them here in Apple's official Swift docs. Property Observers are essentially

Reduce(into: _) wins! (Swift 4.0)

For a little while now I have been casually poking around and learning Swift in the context of iOS development. One of the things that excited me about learning Swift was hearing it embraced many concepts from the world of functional programming. And, of

es6

N-Queens: Node Cluster

Just recently I was talking with a student about using node clusters and realized that it would be a great addition to the collection of N-Queens comparisons I have done so far. If you aren't sure what I'm referring to you can find the

Javascript

Functional Javascript: The 'Maybe' Functor

Recently I started writing about functional programing in Javascript by talking about what a functor is. Essentialy a functor is: An object with a map method that can be applied to the values it contains In this post I used the identity functor as

es6

It's the little things

Today I hit a small pain point while working in React and decided that enough was enough. It's one that anyone working with es6 and React will run into: binding your component methods. class someComponent extends React.Component { constructor(props) { super(props); this.someMethod

Javascript

Native Web Sockets

Recently I was working on a project which was going to use web sockets to relay backend updates to all connected clients in real time. I have worked with Socket.IO in the past and found it wonderfully easy to use. This time however

Javascript

Gettin Sassy

A few months back I wrote a post about the exciting discovery that I might be able to handle my styling in React by simply composing Javascript objects. I left that post having declared my excitement but having not spent enough time with this

Javascript

Functional Javascript: Functors

Yeah!! Functors, applicatives, monads. More and more these terms are popping up around the Javascript world, and for good reason! Functional programming is a fascinating paradigm which is both an enjoyable intellectual endeavor and a practical way to improve your code quality. However, many

React

Let your users share it!

Last week I made a thing. It's a simple thing, a group photo booth, which I made to show students the power of real time data streams using sockets and RethinkDB's change feeds. You can check out the code if you like. After a

WebRTC

Using the Webcam in React

Just recently I started a fun little side project and found myself using the webRTC spec api for the first time. To my delight I found that is a remarkably simple and straight forward tool and there are plenty examples out there to get

functional programming

RxJs - Loop Fusion

Whether I am programming in Javascript or another language I have found that the practicing the principles of functional programming to be tremendous fun. So no matter what language or project which I am working in/on I am always trying to understand and

Algorithms

N-Queens - Go

Alright, if you've read any of my recent posts you already know what this is all about If you aren't familiar with the Go syntax definitely make a quick read of that last one, it will get you up to speed enough real quick.

Go

Getting Going with Go

Yesterday I wrote about what sparked me to embark on a bit of a journey exploring concurrency in other languages. What I have decided to do is learn just enough to write and test a concurrent solution to N-Queens in each language, just as

Concurrency

Walking Far From Home

If you know me or have read my posts here before you undoubtably know that I work in Javascript. In fact you might be aware that I really LOVE Javascript. It may not be the fastest language and it may be missing some features

Javascript

Rx Foundations

Just last week I was fortunate enough to be able to attend a workshop on Angular 2 and RxJS. I had a really great time and can say that I am really interested to learn more about what Angular 2 is doing. (Which might

Web Workers

Web Workers - Conclusion

If you read my last post you know I recently had a bit of fun playing around with web workers. While this little experiment was fun as a simple way to learn how to use web workers it also led me to some very

Algorithms

N-Queens - Web Workers

Well it has been not one but two posts in the lead up to this one. I going to avoid repeating myself here, so if you aren't familiar with the N-Queens problem, web workers or why I'm talking about them together, check those out.

Javascript

Web Workers - The Intro

Someone recently suggested a little experiment to me that I found interesting. They made the observation that the classic N-Queens problem offered many contained sub-routines which could be used to test out web workers. So why not try them out? Intrigued, I went ahead

Javascript

N-Queens

N-Queens, for those unfamiliar, is a classic algorithm challenge which I first came across several months ago. I came across it again recently in working with a group of students and someone suggested an additional challenge: implement a solution using web workers. Now I

es6

Curry

This week I had a passing conversation with another engineer that highlighted a misunderstanding that I had about what exactly it means to create a curried function. My misuse of the term had concerned the pipe function because, as I understood it, to curry

React

All Javascript, All The Time

This week I had an exciting epiphany about a particular part of my workflow that I’ll admit is not my favorite, styling. While working on a project in React I found it really simple to create simple objects in my component file to

Reduce

Reduce the Reducers!

Currently I have the great fortune of getting to work on a project using React and Redux on the front end. This is not, however, a post about why I am finding this a wonderful and fun ecosystem to work in. There are enough

Javascript

Code Teardown #0 - Lodash's Reduce

Today I’ve decided to write what I am terming a test run on a theme of blog posts I’m considering, ‘Code Teardowns’. I recently was introduced to the site iFixit while listening to an episode of the Hanselminutes podcast and was immediately

ESLint

Setting Up Sublime for ES6 & React(JSX)

Recently I was very excited to begin working on a new project for which my team would be using React with Redux and writing in ES6. I was thankful to find that setting up syntax highlighting and linting was fairly painless to set up