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The Australian Republic Question
With the passing of Queen Elisabeth II, the talk of whether Australia should become a republic will probably start making the rounds once more. I don’t consider myself a royalist, and when the last referendum on the issue came around, I voted in favour of becoming a republic. The idea of having the British Royal Family as the head of state of a country halfway around the world seem anachronistic to me, and I was disappointed when the referendum failed. Continue reading →
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Detecting When GetItem On DynamoDB Returns Nothing
I was trying to remember how best to detect when a GetItem call to DynamoDB returns no values. That is, when there’s no item with that key in the table. This is in a project that is using v2 of the Go AWS SDK. After poking through some old code that did this, it looks like the way to do so is to check that the returned Item field is nil: Continue reading →
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Some Photos of The Yarra Trail
Went for a very short walk of the Yarra Trail around Heidelberg on Saturday. The evening light was really lovely so I though I’d take some photos. Continue reading →
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Milestone
For a while, I’ve been trying to maintain a writing streak. I need to write at least one blog post or journal entry a day. Today that streak has been maintained for a full year. I will admit that the streak was not completely continuous: I had to go back a few times and retroactively add a post. But even so, I’m quite please with reaching this milestone. Onward to the next one. Continue reading →
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Some Things I Found Out While Browsing a Substack Newsletter in The Wayback Machine
I did a quick search for that blog post in the the Wayback Machine. I couldn’t find the post but the Substack newsletter was there. I guess Substack does allows archiving of newsletters with the “substack.com” domain after all (if it’s something that they can even control). Anyway, here are a few things I’ve found out while browsing through a Substack newsletter in the Wayback Machine: Clicking “Let me read it first” works: it slides away and the most recent posts show up. Continue reading →
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Rebinding Keys For Quickly Resolving Conflicts in GoLand
I’m dealing with a lot of conflicts today as I try to clear a backlog of Git rebases in my to-do pile. I’ve been using GoLand to do this, as my current Git “mergetool” is configured to Vimdiff for some reason1 and I’m not really bothered to find some other tool, at least not yet. GoLand does a pretty good job. Unfortunately, the default key-bindings for resolving conflicts in GoLand is far from good. Continue reading →
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Turning Off Shared Command History in Oh My Zsh
TL,DR: add “unsetopt share_history” to your .zshrc file I’ve been using Oh My Zsh at work for a few months. As far as terminal config managers go, this one works pretty well. But the default configuration does include something which I found quite annoying. First, a few words on how I use the terminal. I’m in the terminal constantly in my day to day. At the start of the day, I’m creating terminal tabs and running commands to do things like build the project I’m working on, start a testing session, etc. Continue reading →
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Kyneton Botanical Gardens
Went to Kyneton with Mum and Dad today. While they went off for a bike ride, I had the opportunity to go for a walk around the botanical gardens. This was my first time there, and although the gardens themselves were not very big, it was still a pleasant experience. Here are some photos I took of that visit. This was followed by lunch at Little Swallow Cafe. The place was quite busy — I suspect that their reputation is such that it would be busy most of the time — but the food was very nice. Continue reading →
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DynamoDB JSON Attribute Types Quick Reference
Because apparently it’s too difficult for AWS to provide an easy way to find this information. Atomic Types Type JSON Value Binary B String value containing the Base64-encoded binary data. Boolean BOOL Either true or false String S String value Number N String with the numerical value Null NULL Should always be true Collection Types Type JSON Value List L A JSON array, with each element being an attribute with a type. Continue reading →
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More Complaining About Autocorrect on MacOS
Earlier this morning: Me: (writing in my journal) Nonna, my 91 year-old grandmother… Autocorrect: Did you me “Donna”? Me: No, undo change. (continue writing) good news is that Nonna… Autocorrect: Did you me “Gonna”? I can forgive MacOS for considering nonna a spelling error, since it’s not an English word. But I do see why auto-correct on MacOS can be frustrating. Apart from the two completely random corrections it made for the same word, it also doesn’t seem to get the hint when I undo the change. Continue reading →
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Write It Down
I am feeling some very minor after-effects from the booster I took yesterday (nothing serious, just the expected cold-like symptoms). I was curious as to whether it was anything like I experienced in January, when I got my last booster. I went to my journal to see what I wrote about it. Unfortunately for me, there was nothing there. To be fair to my past self, there were some other events going on at the same time which I did write about. Continue reading →
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Newsletter Reminder Emails
I subscribe to a newsletter that sends “reminder” emails if I skip an issue. If I don’t open one of the email newsletters I receive, then a few days later, a copy will be sent with a forward of the form “looks like you skipped an issue. Here what you missed.” These reminder emails are bad, and here’s why: It gives the impression of hustling me. I appreicate the time you take to publish something that I see value in, but sending these reminders feels like your forcing your content onto me. Continue reading →
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The Feature Epic (Featuring the Epic Feature Branch)
Here’s what’s been happening at work with me recently. I write it here as an exercise in how I can learn from this. They say that writing can help in this respect so I’m going to put that logic to the test (in either case, just having this documented somewhere could prove useful). We’re working on a pretty large change to the billing service powering the SaaS product sold by the company I work at. Continue reading →
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Arriving Late
I’m going to have to tell my boss today that the stuff my squad has been working on is going to arrive late. To much needs to be fixed or reworked, and there is one or two things that have been missed alltogeather. I think the biggest problem is that the thing we’ve been working on got into testing far too late — only a few days before the deadline — meaning that there was no time left for fixing things. Continue reading →
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Wrong Number
Got called three times this morning by mistake from an old woman in NSW trying to contact her son who had a very similar phone number to mine. First time I ignored it as I didn’t recognised the number and thought it was spam. Second time I answered and after trying to understand what she was trying to say, I simply said “I think you got the wrong number, sorry” and hung up. Continue reading →
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Honour, Democracy, and Galati: A Day in Canberra
Since being in Canberra, I haven’t really done anything “touristy”. Given that today was a public holiday, I figured it was as good a time as ever to do so. So I decided to spend the day visiting a couple of national landmarks, plus something I’ve been planning to do since returning to Canberra. The War Memorial The first time I’ve ever been in Canberra was during Christmas holidays in 2007 my family. Continue reading →
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Afternoon Walk Around Lake Ginninderra
Went for an walk around Lake Ginninderra this afternoon. Well, not “around” the lake: that walk would have taken a while. But I did walk along the path that would take me around the lake for about 30 minutes, then walked back again. Below are a few photos I took. Continue reading →
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My Evening
So here’s how I spent my evening: Watching the WWDC state of the union until the DNS resolver konked out in the WiFi router, causing the Chromecast to get into a state in which it could no longer connect to the network, resulting in about 10 minutes of troubleshooting before deceiding to clean up, not go to the gym, spend another 10 minutes trying to troubleshoot the issue, then stared at my laptop for about half an hour wondering whether to go back to troubleshooting the Chromecast, or doing something else with the hope that it would eventually work itself out. Continue reading →
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The Powerline Track Walk
Went on a walk of the Powerline Track, which I was personally calling the “powerline walk” (yes, I’m impressed at how close I was). I saw this trail when I was in Canberra earlier this year, and knowing that I would be back, I made a note to actually walk it, which I did today. This track follows the powerlines just south of Aranda Bushland Nature Reserve, then goes under Gungahlin Drive and into the Black Mountain Nature Reserve. Continue reading →
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Humour In Conference Videos — Less Is More
It might be just me but I get a little put off with over-the-top attempts at humour in developer conference videos. I’m four minutes into a conference video which has already included some slap-stick humour (with cheesy CGI), and someone trying to pitch to me on why what they’re talking about is worth listening to. This was done in such a way that it actually distracted me from the content, a. Continue reading →
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Cloud Formation "ValidationError at typeNameList" Errors
I was editing some Cloud Formation today and when I tried to deploy it, I was getting this lengthy, unhelpful error message: An error occurred (ValidationError) when calling the CreateChangeSet operation: 1 validation error detected: Value ‘[AWS:SSM::Parameter, AWS::SNS::Topic]’ at ’typeNameList’ failed to satisfy constraint: Member must satisfy constraint: [Member must have length less than or equal to 204, Member must have length greater than or equal to 10, Member must satisfy regular expression pattern: [A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}::[A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}::[A-Za-z0-9]{2,64}(::MODULE){0,1}] Continue reading →
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GitLab Search Subscriptions with NetNewsWire
I’m working (with others) on a project that’s using GitLab to host the code, and I’m looking for a better way to be notified of new merge requests that I need to review. I cannot rely on the emails from GitLab as they tend to be sent for every little thing that happens on any of the merge requests I am reviewing. For this reason, any notifications sent by email will probably get missed by me. Continue reading →
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What Would Get Me Back to Using Twitter Again
Congratulations, Elon Musk, on your purchase of Twitter. I’m sure you’ve got a bunch of ideas of how you want to move the company forward. I was once a user of Twitter myself — albeit not a massive one — and I’m sure you would just love to know what it would take for me to be a user once more. Well, here’s some advice on how you can improve the platform in ways that would make me consider going back. Continue reading →
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Showing A File At a Specific Git Revision
To display the contents of a file at a given revision in Git, run the following command: $ git show <revision>:<filename> For example, to view the version of “README.md” on the dev branch: $ git show dev:README.md There is an alternative form of this command that will show the changes applied to that file as part of the commit: $ git show <revision> -- <filename> This can be used alongside the log command to work out what happened to a file that was deleted. Continue reading →
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Code Review Software Sucks. Here's How I Would Improve It
This post is about code reviews, and the software that facilitates them. I’ll be honest: I’m not a huge fan of code reviews, so a lot of what I speak of below can probably be dismissed as that from someone who blames their tools. Be that as it may, I do think there is room for improvements in the tooling used to review code, and this post touches on a few additional features which would help. Continue reading →