I'VE GOT THE BYTE ON MY SIDE

Midnight strikes, I lose the wager, woken by a screeching pager,
Scarlet hue means issue’s major, major OOMing on the node.
SSH into the victim, tail and grep per playbook’s dictum,
‘Til revealed is cache eviction as what crumbled ‘neath the load.
Run a dump of heap and threading, start the steps for shedding load.
Who hath merged this wretched code?

Much of Scala’s power comes from its flexibility and generality as a language. You can mold it quite extensively to suit your particular problem domain or coding style.

The downside of this is that Scala can sometimes be permissive and accommodating to a fault. You often hear Haskell or F# users attest to a sense of “if it compiles, it works” – in my experience this is not generally the case with Scala.

To illustrate this point, let’s walk through a few examples, all of which are distilled from honest-to-goodness I-swear-I’m-not-making-this-up bugs my team or I have encountered.

I’m happy to publicize a little project I’ve been working on recently: 1Poshword, a PowerShell client for the 1Password password manager. Code is available at https://github.com/latkin/1poshword.

There is a page in the Hugo documentation that describes how to use MathJax to embed nicely-typeset mathematics in one’s Hugo-generated site.

For my own site, I took this as a starting point and made a few improvements. Here’s how I do the math typesetting in this blog.

This is a bug/curiosity in PowerShell that I stumbled upon a few years ago, but never wrote up. The behavior hasn’t changed significantly in the intervening verions, so now I’m finally getting around to a quick blog post.