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ColdFusion, Lucee
& BoxLang.
Deep dives into ColdFusion, Lucee, and BoxLang — modern CFML development, runtime internals, and the future of the JVM web stack.
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Do you want to play a game?
Robert ported 1983's Zork to BoxLang to demonstrate natural language parsing without AI models. Transcribed original ZIL (Zork Implementation Language) source from GitHub into BoxLang structs—rooms, objects, exits, synonyms, flags—using Claude for verbatim translation only. Parser handles tokenization and verb resolution like Infocom's original, proving vintage solutions remain viable.
Latest Articles
I asked Claude to describe my personality...
Robert asked Claude to describe their personality without flattery. Claude analyzed author's configuration files, code projects, and documented preferences to generate detailed personality assessment. Key finding: Claude effectively reverse-engineered personality traits from technical documentation and system design patterns, demonstrating how structured configuration files inadvertently reveal behavioral patterns and work preferences.
Writing Effective Claude Skills
Claude skills are reusable, prompt-based automation shortcuts stored as `SKILL.md` files with YAML frontmatter and Markdown instructions. Best practices: narrow scope (one job per skill), specific instructions with examples, separate process (SKILL.md) from knowledge (REFERENCE.md), use XML tags for structure, control invocation via `disable-model-invocation` and `user-invocable` flags, and iterate based on real outputs.
Stump the Programmer: The Recursive Shelf
Robert presents a ColdFusion/BoxLang coding challenge to build a recursive function that converts a flat array of hierarchical category data (using `id` and `parent_id` relationships) into a nested tree structure without using loops. The solution uses `arrayFilter()` to find children of each parent and `arrayMap()` to recursively build the `children` array for each node, with an optional bonus feature to alphabetically sort children at each nesting level using a `sortKey` parameter.
Stop Memorizing rsync Flags: Use a Wrapper Instead
`rsync-profiles` is a simple bash wrapper that replaces long, error-prone `rsync` commands with named profiles. Define your source, target, and exclusions in an INI-style config file, then sync with a single command like `rsync-profiles myprofile`. It supports remote servers via SSH, dry-run previews, custom rsync flags, and profile listing. Great for anyone tired of fat-fingering remote paths or digging through bash history to find that one sync command they ran three months ago.
Building a better spider
Robert evolved a web scraping service over several years to extract link metadata (Open Graph, Twitter Cards, oEmbed, JSON-LD) for social sharing features, progressively hardening it against bot detection, timeouts, and SSL errors. The latest version uses a multi-layered extraction strategy—rotating user-agents, disabling certificate validation, adding browser headers only for non-bot UAs to maximize successful extraction.
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