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Select Fun From PostgreSQL
Using PostgreSQL these last few months reminds me of just how much fun it is to work with a relational database. DynamoDB is very capable, but I wouldn’t call it fun. It’s kinda boring, actually. Not that that’s a bad thing: one could argue that “boring” is what you want from a database. Working with PostgreSQL, on the other hand, has been fun. There’s no better word to describe it. It’s been quite enjoyable designing new tables and writing SQL statements. Continue reading →
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Rubberducking: Of Config And Databases
It’s been a while since my last rubber-ducking session. Not that I’m in the habit of seeking them out: I mainly haven’t been in a situation when I needed to do one. Well that chance came by yesterday, when I was wondering whether to put queue configuration either in the database as data, or in the environment as configuration. This one’s relatively short, as I was leaning towards one method of the other before I started. Continue reading →
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About Those STOP Messages
John Gruber, discussing political spam text messages on Daring Fireball: About a month ago I switched tactics and started responding to all such messages with “STOP”. I usually send it in all caps, just like that, because I’m so annoyed. I resisted doing this until a month ago thinking that sending any reply at all to these messages, including the magic “STOP” keyword, would only serve to confirm to the sender that an actual person was looking at the messages sent to my phone number. Continue reading →
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My Home Computer Naming Scheme
I enjoyed Manton’s post about the naming scheme he uses for Micro.blog servers. I see these names pop up in the logs when I go to rebuild my blog, each with a Wikipedia link explaining the origins of the name (that’s a really nice touch). Having a server or desktop naming scheme is one of those fun little things to do when working with computers. Growing up we named our home desktops after major characters of Lord of the Rings, such as Bilbo, or Frodo, but I never devised a scheme for myself when I started buying my own computers. Continue reading →
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Go Feature Request: A 'Rest' Operator for Literals
Here’s a feature request for Go: shamelessly copying JavaScript and adding support for the “rest” operator in literals. Go does have a rest operator, but it only works in function calls. I was writing a unit test today and I was thinking to myself that it would be nice to use this operator in both slice and struct literals as well. This could be useful for making copies of values without modifying the originals. Continue reading →
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A Follow-Up To Mockless Unit Testing
I’m sure everyone’s dying to hear how the mockless unit tests are going. It’s been almost two months since we started this service, and we’re smack bang in the middle of brownfield iterative development: adding new features to existing ones, fixing bugs, etc. So it seems like now is a good time to reflect on whether this approach is working or not. And so far, it’s been going quite well. The amount of code we have to modify when refactoring or changing existing behaviour is dramatically smaller than before. Continue reading →
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On the Easy Pit To Fall Into
From Matt Bircher’s latest post on Birchtree: One of the hard parts about sharing one’s opinions online like I do is that it’s very easy to fall into the trap of mostly complaining about things. This is something I also think about. While I haven’t done anything scientific to know what my ratio of posting about things I like vs. things I don’t, I feel like I’m getting the balance better. Continue reading →
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A Tour Of My New Self-Hosted Code Setup
While working on the draft for this post, a quote from Seinfield came to mind which I thought was a quite apt description of this little project: Breaking up is knocking over a Coke machine. You can’t do it in one push. You gotta rock it back and forth a few times and then it goes over. I’ve been thinking about “breaking up” with Github on and off for a while now. Continue reading →
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Zerolog’s API Mistake
I’ll be honest, I was expecting a lot more moan-routine posts than I’ve written to date. Guess I’ve been in a positive mood. That is, until I started using Zerolog again this morning. Zerolog is a Go logging package that we use at work. It’s pretty successful, and all in all a good logger. But they made a fundamental mistake in their API which trips me up from time to time: they’re not consistent with their return types. Continue reading →
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A Bit of 'Illuminating' Computer Humour
Here’s some more computer-related humour to round out the week: How many software developers does it take to change a lightbulb? Just one. How many software developers does it take to change 2 lightbulbs? Just 10. How many software developers does it take to change 7 lightbulbs? One, but everyone within earshot will know about it. How many software developers does it take to change 32 lightbulbs? Just one, provided the space is there. Continue reading →
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Asciidoc, Markdown, And Having It All
Took a brief look at Asciidoc this morning. This is for that Markdown document I’ve been writing in Obsidian. I’ve been sharing it with others using PDF exports, but it’s importance has grown to a point where I need to start properly maintaining a change log. And also… sharing via PDF exports? What is this? Microsoft Word in the 2000s? So I’m hoping to move it to a Gitlab repo. Gitlab does support Markdown with integrated Mermaid diagrams, but not Obsidian’s extension for callouts. Continue reading →
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My Position On Blocking AI Web Crawlers
I’m seeing a lot of posts online about sites and hosting platforms blocking web crawlers used for AI training. I can completely understand their position, and fully support them: it’s their site and they can do what they want. Allow me to lay my cards on the table. My current position is to allow these crawlers to access my content. I’m choosing to opt in, or rather, not to opt out. Continue reading →
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Thinking About Plugins In Go
Thought I’d give Go’s plugin package a try for something. Seems to works fine for the absolutely simple things. But start importing any dependencies and it becomes a non-starter. You start seeing these sorts of error messages when you try to load the plugin: plugin was built with a different version of package golang.org/x/sys/unix Looks like the host and plugins need to have exactly the same dependencies. To be fair, the package documentation says as much, and also states that the best use of plugins is for dynamically loaded modules build from the same source. Continue reading →
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Word Cloud
From Seth’s blog: Consider building a word cloud of your writing. Seems like a good idea so that’s what I did, taking the contents of the first page of this blog. Here it is: Some observations: One of the most prominent words is “just”, with “it’s” not far behind. I though it’s because I started a lot of sentences with “it’s just”, but it turns out I’ve only used that phrase once, while the individual words show up around 10 times each. Continue reading →
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Day Trip to Bundanoon
Decided to go on a day trip to Bundanoon today. It’s been five years since I last visited and I remember liking the town enough that I thought it’d be worth visiting again. It’s not close, around 1 hour and 40 minutes from Canberra, but it not far either and I thought it would be a nice way to spend the day. Naturally, others agreed, which I guess explains why it was busier than I expected, what with the long weekend and all. Continue reading →
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An Unfair Critique Of OS/2 UI Design From 30 Years Ago
A favourite YouTube channel of mine is Michael MJD, who likes to explore retro PC products and software from the 90s and early 2000s. Examples of these include videos on Windows 95, Windows 98, and the various consumer tech products designed to get people online. Can I just say how interesting those times were, where phrases such as “surfing the net” were thrown about, and where shopping centres were always used to explain visiting websites. Continue reading →
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Some More Thoughts On Unit Testing
Kinda want to avoid this blog descending into a series of “this is wrong with unit testing” posts, but something did occur to me this morning. We’ve kicked off a new service at work recently. It’s just me and this other developer working on it at the moment, and it’s given us the opportunity to try out this “mockless” approach to testing, of which I ranted about a couple of weeks ago (in fact, the other developer is the person I had that discussion with). Continue reading →
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Side Scroller 95
I haven’t been doing much work on new projects recently. Mainly, I’ve been perusing my archives looking for interesting things to play around with. Some of them needed some light work to get working again but really I just wanted to experience them. I did come across one old projects which I’ll talk about here: a game I called Side Scroller 95. And yes, the “95” refers to Windows 95. Continue reading →
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Don't Leave User Experience For Later
DDH wrote a post yesterday that resonates with me. This is how he opens: Programmers are often skeptical of aesthetics because they frequently associate it with veneering I doubt DHH reads this blog, but he could’ve address this post directly at me. I’m skeptical about aesthetics. Well… maybe not skeptical, but if we’re talking about personal projects, I do consider it less important than the functional side of things. Or at least I did. Continue reading →
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Writing Good Data Migration Scripts
I’m waiting for a data migration to finish, so I’ve naturally got migration scripts on my mind. There’s an art to writing a good migration script. It may seem that simply throwing together a small Python script would be enough; and for the simpler cases, it very well might be. But it’s been my experience that running the script in prod is likely to be very different than doing test runs in dev. Continue reading →
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On Sharing Too Much About Too Little
Manuel Moreale wrote an interesting post today about sharing stuff online: Life can be joyful and wonderful and marvellous. But it can also be a fucking nightmare. And yes, it’s important to celebrate the victories and to immortalise the glorious moment. But it’s also important to document the failures, the shitty moments, the dark places our minds find themselves stuck in. It’s all part of what makes us unique after all. Continue reading →
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As Someone Who Works In Software
As someone who works in software… I cringe every time I see society bend to the limitations of the software they use. It shouldn’t be this way; the software should serve the user, not the other way around. I appreciate a well designed API. Much of my job is using APIs built by others, and the good ones always feel natural to use, like water flowing through a creek. Conversely, a badly designed API makes me want to throw may laptop to the ground. Continue reading →
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The Perfect Album
The guys on Hemispheric Views have got me blogging once again. The latest episode bought up the topic of the perfect album: an album that you can “just start from beginning, let it run all the way through without skipping songs, without moving around, just front to back, and just sit there and do nothing else and just listen to that whole album”. Well, having crashed Hemispheric Views once, I’d thought it’s time once again to give my unsolicited opinion on the matter. Continue reading →
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Favourite Comp. Sci. Textbooks
John Siracusa talked about his two favourite textbooks on Rec Diffs #233: Modern Operation Systems, and Computer Networks, both by Andrew S. Tanenbaum. I had those textbooks at uni as well. I still do, actually. They’re fantastic. If I were to recommend something on either subject, it would be those two. The two Tanenbaums. I will add that my favourite textbook I had during my degree was Compilers: Principal, Techniques and Tools by Alfred V. Continue reading →
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Thou Doth Promote Too Much
Manual Moreale wrote an interesting post about self promotion, where he reflects on whether closing out all his People and Blogs post with a line pointing to his Ko-Fi page is too much: And so I added that single line. But adding that single line was a struggle. Because in my head, it’s obvious that if you do enjoy something and are willing to support it, you’d probably go look for a way to do it. Continue reading →