Terrence Ho

Writing My Blog Posts with Org

Sun, 30 Jun 2019 18:15:00 -0700

Hugo is an awesome blog generator. However, it’s primary content mode is Markdown, and writing in org-mode feels much better than writing in Markdown. org-mode can automatically convert to Markdown, but then I have to edit the generated Markdown file to add YAML front-matter that Hugo consumes, which is annoying.

Enter ox-hugo. It allows you to maintain and generate Hugo-compatible Markdown in org-mode, and automatically generates the necessary metadata Hugo requires. However, like all good things in life, you have to work a little to configure it to your liking. (What’s an extension without spending a couple hours of life figuring out exactly how to make it conform to your workflow in the pursuit of “optimization”). This is how I configure ox-hugo to write all my blog posts (including this blog post!).

How I Started Using Emacs

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 16:53:00 -0700

This is how I started using GNU Emacs with no prior experience. This is intended to help those who want to start using Emacs as well. I’ll start from a base setup, show you where I looked around for help, show you how I found myself using my current configuration. While this post goes through the steps to get started with Emacs, I definitely omitted the steps that didn’t help or the parts where I floundered around not knowing what I was doing.

Benchmarking Fib with Go

Wed, 22 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Go has a really nice testing suite built into its compiler tool chains. It’s as simple as running go test in your package, and all files marked *_tests.go will be executed. We can also run benchmarks during testing, by adding the -bench flag to the go test command. I never really benchmarked anything before, so I decided to explore Go’s benchmarking utilities, and flex some of my algorithm skills in the process. Naturally I decided implement the Fibonacci sequence many, many times over.

From Object Oriented To Functional

Sat, 21 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Many coders have heard of the term “functional programming”, but have often never really used it or its properties. Especially if they came from Java, where there are no real functions, only methods each function has to be attached to an object, and cannot stand by itself. Functions are commomly thought of as defining behavior. However, functions can also be thought of as data, instead of just instructions. They are data that define your instructions.