“RC” stands for the Recurse Center. So, today was my first day at RC. I will be spending the next three months growing as a programmer (and as a person, for that matter). I am blown away by the quality of the people and of the work environment here. I feel extremely privileged to be a part of this community.

I had been meaning to give xonsh a try for a while now. I may explore its use in the context of data analysis workflows. I installed it in a Python 3.6 conda environment and, voilà, I could run Bash and Python commands together! Look:

$ import glob
$ if len(glob.glob('*.csv')) < 10: ls

For the rest of the afternoon, I debugged the blog that this very post lives in. Thank you Arpith, Yuri, and Ashley for bearing with me! We noticed issues with the links found in my RSS feed:

  • the domain name was wrong;
  • dates (and, hence, URLs) were derived from UTC time, not local time (which results in the next day if you are blogging in the evening somewhere in the Americas).

The first issue was quite straightforward to fix. Somehow, when setting up this blog a long time ago, I gave a domain name which I never (even intended to) purchase.

The second issue was confusing, because what I would get locally (untracked files under _sites/ resulting from $ jekyll build and browseable via $ jekyll serve) would differ from what lived online. Locally, I would get dates based on local time: This [post], written on December 30, 2015 around 8pm Montréal time, would be dated 2015-12-30. I think this is the desired behaviour. But, online, the same post would be dated 2015-12-31 and live at a URL containing .../2015/12/31/....

Specifying the timezone in the configuation fixed the dates and URLs online. But it did not fix the links in the RSS feed! The answer came from reading through this issue, which made us aware of the Jekyll Feed plugin.

Finally, since I was running Jekyll version 3.0.1, I thought I would upgrade to the latest version (3.7.3). Somehow,

$ gem update jekyll
Updating installed gems
Nothing to update

would not do…(?) I had to run

$ gem install jekyll:3.7.3

explicitly to get the latest version of Jekyll. I admit I am not fully comfortable running Ruby and Jekyll system-wide… I create a virtualenv or a conda env even for the tiniest Python project. Apparently, in Ruby, you would use RVM or rbenv. Well, I admit my static blog is not really a Ruby project.