ides.ws

Glastonbury for geeks (notes from a newbie).

The strange death of a pioneering Cold War computer scientist.

Shining a light on the Mercury Seven.

On getting the RSGB Amateur Radio Foundation Licence.

It's always DNS, except when it isn't.

A list of all the books I read in 2025.

Comments shouldn't explain what a piece of code is doing, but why it is doing it.

A masterclass in missed opportunity.

The one where AI takes all the good bits and leaves all the bad.

The form in which an idea is presented should reflect the size of the idea.

A documentary series from Adam Curtis.

No, not futurism, just a rant about a pop song.

After working as a full-time PHP developer for a decade, how have I not heard of this before!?

The case of the missing mouse cursor and why having multiple package managers is a bad idea.

Solving a Conundrum of Dukes, Psalms and Crocodiles.

Understanding the differences, so we can stay out of the news.

When a new technology is first introduced, it's often less useful than nothing at all.

Most engineers dislike tackling bugs, but maybe we just need to re-frame how we view them.

A list of all the books I read in 2024.

Almost thirty years after publication, the medium may have changed, but the message has not.

Can you help Percy and Harriet escape Oxford without being caught by her father?

We recently spent some time battling credit card fraud.

The article I wish I'd read before going to court.

Conferences are a great place to meet new people, especially in the spaces surrounding the talks.

Sometimes it can feel like every business idea you come up with has already been done, but not all the low-hanging fruit has been plucked.

Using the __construct() method for dependency injection in Laravel Artisan commands can have unexpected consequences.

On the trail of better technical interview questions.

A list of all the books I read in 2023.

I keep searching for the piece that will unlock everything, even though I know it doesn't exist.

We can utilise Blue/Green deployments to adjust table row formats in MySQL with minimal down-time.

Getting a couple of simple tasks out of the way helps to get you moving, so don't eat your frogs first.

Fiction seems to be getting less popular, but can it teach us just as much?

Your first, last and only line of defence against the worst rocks (and dirty snowballs) in the Universe.

Behold the unbelievable shelf-life of snack packaging from the 1980s.

Some thoughts on the TV series.

We can't eager-load a relationship with a limit, but we can do it in the same number of queries.

Plenty of tools exist for rebuilding a certificate chain, in-fact you already have one installed.

GitHub Copilot is downright rude, how could we make it more polite?

Marking files as viewed in a GitHub PR helps keep track of things, but GitHub doesn't allow you to mark them all at once.

Like range anxiety, but for people with Spotify instead of an electric car.

A list of all the books I read in 2022.

Deploying an S3 bucket for Terraform state using Terraform needs to be done in two steps.