Author Archives: Philip Cunningham

When I was kid we drew pictures of ourselves and our school put them on a tea towel to sell to parents. Strange that even as a ten year old I knew I wanted to be a programmer (3, 10).

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LittleLGP is a little genetic programming (GP) project written in Clojure. It evolves populations of two distinct classes of programs that have a typical predator prey relationship. One class of program seeks to destabilize the environment whilst the other seeks to bring order.

This project was my first attempt at writing a GP program and my first program written in Clojure. Overall, I really enjoyed working on it, even if the final product isn’t great! The code is available to peruse on Github.

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LittleLGP is a little genetic programming (GP) project written in Clojure. It evolves populations of two distinct classes of programs that have a typical predator prey relationship. One class of program seeks to destabilize the environment whilst the other seeks to bring order.

This project was my first attempt at writing a GP program and my first program written in Clojure. Overall, I really enjoyed working on it, even if the final product isn’t great! The code is available to peruse on Github.

Continue reading →

I have said that computer science is a lot like magic. And it is really good that it is like magic, because there is also a bad part in computer science that is a lot like religion.

– Harold Ableson (1985)

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I have said that computer science is a lot like magic. And it is really good that it is like magic, because there is also a bad part in computer science that is a lot like religion.

– Harold Ableson (1985)

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A real code retreat would be a month of slow hacking + tea brewing. No one would speak. We’d lake swim. We’d delete all the code at the end.— Alex McLean (@yaxu) March 25, 2013

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A real code retreat would be a month of slow hacking + tea brewing. No one would speak. We’d lake swim. We’d delete all the code at the end.— Alex McLean (@yaxu) March 25, 2013

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I wrote these tracks a while back, but they didn’t really fit with the stuff I’d written before now. Writing them helped get me up to speed with Ableton, which I really do miss.

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I wrote these tracks a while back, but they didn't really fit with the stuff I'd written before now. Writing them helped get me up to speed with Ableton, which I really do miss.

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I recently ran into a problem in work where I wanted serialize the same Active Record model to JSON differently depending on context.

The solution I ended up going with was to wrap objects inside an Active Record scope in another object and proxy unknown messages to the internal object.

The example here is somewhat trivial but having these little objects helped add clarity to our JSON API.

class JSONDecorator

  attr_reader :instance

  def self.decorate(instances)
    instances.map {|instance| new(instance) }
  end

  def as_json(opts={})
    raise "define as_json method on subclass"
  end

  def initialize(instance)
    @instance = instance
  end

  def method_missing(method, *args, &block)
    instance.send(method, *args, &block)
  end

end

class ComedianAvailability < JSONDecorator

  def as_json(opts={})
    json = Hash.new
    json["id"]        = id
    json["name"]      = title
    json["rating"]    = url
    json["available"] = available
    json
  end

  def available
    active ? "yes" : "no"
  end

end

json_response = ComedianAvailability.decorate(Comedian.scoped).to_json

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