adrift on a cosmic ocean

Yet another long-overdue post. The last couple of weeks (or perhaps sprints) my team has dived into Typescript for a new project. I like it, really like it. Maybe that's just because for years I've feared Javascript, haven't understood enough about how to unit testing, and found myself writing terrible code and just running it to find the bugs. This is not a very good development methodology…

I'm not sure I've mentioned it on this blog before, but almost three years ago I started a number of online courses around 3D modelling and game development. Way back in 2013 I had done a course on Coursera which introduced me to event loop-based game programming, although the programming difficult of the course was very low. Later on suggestion from a co-worker I looked into Löve2D and took the…

Before you get any ideas about the topic of this post, it's not a rant about OpenResty at all - it's actually a great piece of software and in my opinion a fantastic integration between a capable webserver (Nginx) and a light-weight programming language (Lua). The combination makes it ideal for high-performance delivery of traffic with some light business logic thrown in as well. We use it at my…

Disclaimer: Most of this post was written in 2014, but it's been languishing in my drafts folder for a long time and I thought I'd push the publish button rather than waiting to perfect it. The original context was that I was attempting to perform integration testing on a client application that needed to handle a variety of different network behaviours - including TCP resets. I mulled over how…

Quite some time ago at an AWS Meetup in 2014 I gave a talk (sadly, I can't find the slides) about how we used S3 and built tooling to interact with it based on our understanding of how the internals of the platform worked, and best practices as advised by AWS themselves. One large aspect of the tooling we built was a custom base 62 encoding using the math/big package from the Go standard library…

If you have previously read anything on this blog (directly, rather than via RSS) you will have noticed that the visuals have been updated. This is the culmination of a very long and arduous process - entirely my responsibility and self-inflicted - and as a result, it is running via Netlify, built with Gatsby and stored in Contentful. For styling I relied heavily on Tachyons and for the sake of…

Last week I found myself reading through all (ok not entirely all, I skipped the NASA one) of the slide decks on culturecodes.co - there are a variety of slide decks from tech companies, which attempt to describe what the company culture looks like, their values, or company processes that serve as an employee handbook. They are called Culture Codes and not Company Culture because culture can only…

At $current_employer (unlike $previous_employer where all these problems were sorted out), we have great huge TVs in every room but not consistently useful usage of them. I love seeing big, beautiful dashboards and KPIs visualised everywhere but right now, we just don't have that in place. No matter, this is part of my mission to improve engineering practices here and I'm happy to tackle it. The…

I won't descend into hyperbole and say you should run, shrieking and naked into the dark night, when you hear these words. But, it's worth pondering what exactly it means. I think I've (over)used this phrase myself plenty over the years and right now find myself examining why so many people find themselves needing to invent their own version of well accepted software workflow methodologies. You…

Perhaps the title is somewhat excessive, but it expresses how I feel about this particular topic. I'm not a "front-end person" (whatever that is) and feel much more comfortable behind an API where you don't have to worry about design, markup, logic, styling as well as how to put them all together. That being said, I feel it's an area where I should face my fears head-on, and so I'm doing some…