Harry R. Schwartz

Code writer, sometime Internet enthusiast, attractive nuisance.

Projects

Find me on GitHub or Flickr.

Talks

The Why, Where, and How of Organizing Your Dotfiles, .bayarea, San Francisco, August 2018
Math in Emacs: The Basics (and Not-So-Basics) of Calc, EmacsSF, San Francisco, May 2018
Fundamentals of TDD, eight-module online course on Upcase, released July 2016
Computer Science: Why Bother?, episode of The Weekly Iteration, April 2016
Getting Started with Org-mode, EmacsBoston, Boston, March 2016
Starting an Emacs Meetup, EmacsConf, San Francisco, August 2015
Searching the Web with engine-mode, EmacsNYC, New York, March 2015
UNIX Inodes and Files, internal tech talk at thoughtbot, New York, Jan 2015
Design Pattern Frolics!, internal talk at Metis, New York, Nov 2014
Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua, online interview, July 2014
An Introduction to Emacs Lisp, EmacsNYC, New York, April 2014

Writing

There are many more articles on my blog, but these are some of my favorites:

Code

I’m hrs on GitHub, where I’ve got a bunch of repos of varying quality. A few of the better ones are:

My dotfiles might be interesting if you’re maybe a little too into Emacs.
The command-line tool docsim lets you search local files with the kinds of queries you might use with a search engine. It uses information retrieval techniques (like TF-IDF and cosine similarity) to rank results. Plus, it’s just a little binary written in Go, so it doesn’t depend on installing Elasticsearch or numpy or any other nonsense like that! And, of course, there’s also a docsim.el Emacs mode.
Some friends over at the Church Lab wanted a tool to search through their catalog of primers to find the ones that bind best to a given target region. I wrote PrimerFinder to help with that.
Blueprint is a simple Scheme implemented in Ruby. It includes a bunch of nifty features, including anonymous functions, lexical closures, variadic binding, and non-hygienic fexprs. It’s not the most performant language (it’s just a prototype), but it’s not too poorly written and it has a fairly complete test suite.
I don’t like leaving my editor to look up documentation, so I wrote engine-mode, an Emacs mode for dynamically generating URLs from search terms and opening them in a browser. It’s available on MELPA.
sensible-defaults.el is a collection of Emacs functions that knocks some of the rough edges off the default install. It adds syntax highlighting, relocates backup files, ensures that files end in newlines, and adds many other features. It’s a nice base configuration if you’re getting started.

“Hypertext Art Installations”

Squawkbox.io: monetizing #parrots to empower consumers to interact with #brands. Disruptively. Coming soon to the Bay Area.
Plenty of services will allow you to take a long URL and shorten it, but no one’s tackled the problem of URL lengthening until now! Kilobytely is a free, stateless service that will transform a short, regular address into a grotesque and inscrutable leviathan of a URL.
Many couples adopt pet names for each other. A common pattern for pet names is “[food]-[body part].” Let Questionable Pet Names help you shower affection on your adorable widdle pudding-ears.