Hi, I'm Blake Williams

I'm a full-stack developer living in Boston, MA. I currently work at GitHub where I primarily write Ruby/Rails and a bit of TypeScript. I care a lot about building the right thing and writing great code.

August 18th, 2019

Handling macOS URL schemes with Go

For a while I’ve had this idea of a custom browser handler in macOS that would have configurable rules for determining which browser a URL should open. I finally got around to building it which led to a lot of learning of what to-do and what not to-do when it comes to Cocoa apps and Go interop. If that sounds interesting you can find the code on GitHub, otherwise this post goes over how the core functionality of the application, macOS http/https URL scheme handling was written.

May 9th, 2018

Using Pronto to Introduce Style to Your Rails App

I believe most developers know that code style matters. It helps the code base feel clean and consistent. I’ve worked on a number of projects where teams are working without a style guide due to all of the style debt that’s been accrued. Thanks to Pronto, style guides can be adopted without forcing you to pay off that debt immediately.

August 16th, 2017

Jekyll, Markdown, and Tachyons

I’ve been hearing about Tachyons a lot lately and yesterday decided to try it out by migrating this blog from Bourbon, Neat and custom SASS to Tachyons. I made a lot of great progress but I ran into a problem. How do I style the generated markdown?

July 17th, 2017 February 4th, 2017

Generating Arbitrary Text with Markov Chains in Rust

A friend and I wanted to work on a quick project together and we came up with the idea of making a chatbot. What would make this chatbot special is that it would use the input of another one of our friends so it would post messages that are generated from past messages he’s sent.