One of the worst things you can do to yourself as a programmer is assume you know things that you in fact do not. This attitude will lead you to waste a great deal of time and energy, because it will usually require deeply frustrating and painful experiences (like debugging your "awesome" code from 6 months ago) to make you unlearn what you thought you knew.
Lua is a programming language whose potential as a web development platform has been largely overlooked. Languages such as Python, Ruby, and PHP have a long history of use for web development, but Lua has remained largely stuck in its niche as a games development language. This is unfortunate, because I believe Lua offers some interesting possibilities that make it a good candidate for web applications:
So I'm finally starting to wrap up one of the longest Yak-shaving expeditions I've ever been on. A few weeks ago I decided to move my blog over to a statically-generated HTML site, with the intention of eventually hosting it at Github. I took a look at the various options out there and in a moment of classic programmer hubris, decided I'd rather roll my own solution rather than go with any of the ones currently available.
I've been working on open source projects for a few years as both a contributor and maintainer, and at times I've run into some annoyances that I think merit a blog post. Below are a few suggestions for working on open source: from both sides of the keyboard.
I have to laugh when I read the sometimes visceral reactions people have to Haml – people who ask rhetorically, "what's wrong with using Erb?" I'm not in the business of trying to solve problems you don't have. If you are fine using Erb, keep using it. You're not doing anything wrong, but you're missing out. You're using nano, when you could be using vim. You're using TextEdit when you could be using TextMate. You're using Notepad when you could be using, well, whatever the hell people use on Windows.