Nik Haldimann

At Work

About

I'm a Swiss-bred, NYC-based producer of words and code. At various points in my life I wrote noteworthy amounts of code in Basic, Turbo Pascal, Perl, Python, Smalltalk, Ruby, Java and JavaScript. I worked at Google for 5 years. Most of the time I know what I'm doing.

For my musical and artistic obsessions read my Tumblr; for technical insights consult my blog; for some code look me up on GitHub; if you know me in person befriend me on Facebook (I will usually ignore strangers); and for lots of things mashed up together follow me on Twitter.

Blog Salt Mines

Tales of electronic drudgery

Failure Notifications for Rake Tasks on the Heroku Scheduler

For users of Heroku, the Scheduler add-on is a convenient and cheap way to run scheduled batch jobs. However, you get what you pay for: it’s a little bare bones. For example, it doesn’t... Read more

Feb 19

Multiple Delegates in Ruby

I found that, out of the box, delegating method calls to multiple objects is not straight-forward in Ruby. There are two modules in the Ruby standard library that cover most delegation use cases:... Read more

Feb 1

Robust Parameterized Unit Tests in Ruby with param_test

Parameterized unit tests come in handy when you have a simple API that you want to test in the same way with multiple inputs and expected outputs. Instead of creating duplicates of a test with... Read more

Jan 23

Tumblr Nik's Vorfreude

Highly subjective preview of happenings in NYC and beyond

Week of 5/6/13: Spring for Antonioni

Spring for Music with the Buffalo Phil at Carnegie Hall: Wed, 7.30 pm Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Look it up, kids. The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra can... Read more

May 7

Week of 4/22/13: Climaxing with Shaker Loops

Now Arriving: American Soundscapes at Carnegie Hall: Wed & Thu, 7.30 pm For their series Now Arriving, Carnegie Hall invites young musicians to workshops led by great artists that... Read more

Apr 23

Week of 4/15/13: Low-key Chamber Music Week

ACME at the Morgan Library & Museum: Thu, 7.30 pm It’s a week for high-profile chamber ensembles to kick up some dust in low-profile spaces, starting with ACME, a sort of supergroup... Read more

Apr 15

Twitter @nikhaldi

Zwitscher zwitscher

"Google employees gave more than 97% of their political donations to Obama" https://t.co/6xYLKu5sC5

May 21

@bradofarrell what? it does make you dance around to annoying clickety-click sounds your coworkers make with their detachable keyboard

May 21

A eureka moment: "During a half-hour lull in his friend’s backyard [..], the solution suddenly came to him" http://t.co/PqyIWWbrId

May 21