Writings on various topics (mostly technical) from Oliver Hookins and Angela Collins. We currently reside in Sydney after almost a decade in Berlin, have three kids, and have far too little time to really justify having a blog.
Hi everyone, and welcome back to my exceedingly sparse tales of technology adventures! Strap in for an excessively long introduction to this one, it's boring and tedious as hell.
I'll skim over the introduction to the introduction, but like many of you, I've had a gradually growing collection of digital images. Starting in roughly 2001 when my family had a Kodak DC120 1MP Digital Camera (yes, one…
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…
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…
We have an internal service that takes requests of the form something
like /foo/{ID}/bar which basically is expected to generate data of the
form "bar" about the ID entity within the collection "foo". Real
clear! Because this service has a bunch of similar routes that have a
resource identifier as part of the request path, we use the Gorilla Mux
package. There are
a lot of different approaches to…
Perhaps a little late in the year to be conducting a personal retrospective on the years past, but I feel at this point I'm starting to wonder about the challenges ahead. The last two to three years I've distinctly changed my career direction from systems engineering, to "DevOps" (whatever that means anymore), to developer. Sure, I'm technically a Computer Scientist by tertiary education standards…
I notice my pace has yet again slowed between the last chapter of the book - Erlang - and this one. Another five months has passed since I finished the chapter on Erlang! In actual fact, I haven't been slaving away on the next language that whole time - decompression of sorts has to follow each chapter, and dealing with a manic three-year-old, finding some time for a bit of exercise and trying to…
Well, well, well. One virtual "week" later, but two real world months later, I have finished the chapter on Erlang from Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. Based on the Git repository where I am recording my coding efforts through the book, I've been working at it for almost 11 months, which is slightly disappointing, but I have noticed during the chapter on Erlang a subtle shift in how my brain is…
Yet another instalment in my journey through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks - this time on Scala. The iteration period has gone down significantly to almost an actual week, so that's some marked improvement on previous chapters!
I would say that I haven't even really used Java seriously - what little I did in my university time I've forgotten, and I don't believe I was ever competent in the…
Yet another installment in my journey through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks. At this stage it is so far off seven weeks, it's definitely going to be more than seven months, and I'm just hoping it won't take seven years! But it is enjoyable nonetheless - if a little painful.
This time, I've just completed the chapter on Prolog. The previous chapter, which I found reasonably painful as well (but for different reasons) was Io. In the meantime, I've been doing a lot more work in another prototype-based language - JavaScript - and grown accustomed to the paradigm somewhat. For all its flaws (perceived or otherwise), I find JavaScript much easier to work with than Io, although I have to admit the learning experience with Io was…
I've mentioned a couple of times that I started reading through Seven Languages in Seven Weeks, and even though I've recently been heavily sidetracked by Learning Go I just finished chapter two which dealt with Io.
The book gushes over the language, and I've read a lot of other people's blogs where they seem quite excited about it. In the end I couldn't finish the last exercise, even having a working example to go off. It was just a bit too painful trying to find the right object context, navigate around the strange method syntax and other oddities in the language. Of course, it would be wrong to blame the language, so I'm just going to leave it saying that Io didn't…
Almost two years ago now, I wrote a post about how I was fed up with resorting to shell scripting as my knee-jerk reaction to computer problems. At the time, I had been attacking any problem that required more than a couple of commands at the prompt by writing a shell (usually BASH) script and hit major limitations that I really should have been solving with a legitimate programming language. I…
I think I will call this week the last I use shell script as my primary go-to language. Yes, by trade I am a systems administrator but I do have a Bachelor of Computer Science degree and there is a dormant programmer inside me desperately trying to get out. I feel like shell script has become the familiar crutch that I go back to whenever faced with a problem, and that is becoming frustrating to…
I consider myself a failed programmer, having never really excelled at it during University and only really having come to terms with some of the concepts several years later. I've always liked programming but at some point years ago I decided I didn't want to be a programmer/developer so that was that. Since cementing myself in the realm of Systems Administration I've come to miss the programming…