Maori Geek

I want an Error to be raised during JSON unmarshalling if an undetected field is found.

In 2017, Puppet and DORA (DevOps research and assessment) published their annual State of DevOps Report that collates more that six years of survey data about the cultural and technical impacts of DevOps.

When writing blog posts I have a few requirements: Offline: I travel and commute which means that I have no internet frequently which is a great time to write distraction free.

AWS Bread, recipe below As developers we are pretty good at writing fast code because we put a lot of emphasis on that skill (especially in job interviews).

Building security into your company culture is necessary but challenging.

At Coinbase we use a GitHub-flow-ish workflow to collaborate on code and develop features: Create a branch Create/Edit/Delete/Rename files on branch Create a Pull Request (PR) merging the branch into master Get code reviewed and make requested changes Mer…

Bastion at Castel Sant’Angelo You need more than one AWS account.

I am pretty sure that I am human.

A Domain Specific Language (DSL) is a specialized way to clearly describe a problem domain.

Zion National Park’s amazing geology The goal of the infrastructure team at Coinbase is to provide self-service tooling to our engineers to empower them to rapidly develop, monitor, and optimize services with low risk.

While running or driving I enjoy listening to podcasts as they are a great way to passively learn and keep up with various technologies and trends, as well as be entertained.

Alcoa Keystone Charles Duhigg in his book Power of Habit discussed how Paul O’Neil, the CEO of Alcoa (Aluminum Company of America), was able to increase his company’s value by 27 billion by focusing on a goal unrelated the main company objectives, no work…

A bad way to implement a currency exchange would be to have the customer pass their order to an employee who then manually checks the customer balances, decides whether the order is valid, then writes down the order in a big order book (a la the old New Y…

Name a technology that is more useful, more educational, more interesting, and more overpriced than a ultrasound machine.

Strands published a great vision paper about The Big promise of recommender systems.

Over the last 6 months my wife and I have been working and travelling around Europe using Brighton U.K. as a base.

HapiGER, the Happy (Good Enough) Recommender System, has a new version!

Why should you learn new things?

In this post I will briefly describe three optimisations that GER (Good Enough Recommendations) uses to improve recommendations.

I want to run an application on my CoreOS clusters that uses hostnames to communicate between machines.

Separating an application into many small independently developed and deployed microservices that communicate over a thin layer (like http) has many benefits (see Fowler’s article).

I want you to think how deeply dysfunctional it is for you to be afraid of what you created — Uncle Bob Martin Architecture the Lost Years When I sit down to some code that I haven’t touched in a while, I hesitate.

I previously wrote an introduction to the Tessel here where I described a program that blinked out tweets in morse code.

I borrowed a Tessel from a friend @leighghunt to play with some embedded node.js.

NOTE: I am also maintaining this post on github.

In my previous post about using Vagrant to run Docker containers, I recommended not to use Boot2Docker.

I am proud to announce the beta version of HapiGER an open-source, easy to use, easy to integrate recommendations engine.

accepts_nested_attributes_for is a really powerful method in Rails because it allows a model to alter related models through itself.

Docker is great fun when you start building things by plugging useful containers together.

I am not sure where the boundary between Data and Big Data exists, but I must be getting close.

Yeah, Nah: New Zealand slang for yes, or possibly no e.g.

GER (Good Enough Recommendations) is a recommendations engine that could directly add value and increase user engagement for many existing applications.

Search boxes are useful so they are everywhere!

These are some of the tools I use to test my Node.js code: Mocha is a testing framework for describing and running tests Chai is an assertion library Sinon is a mocking and stubbing library In this post I will give a brief introduction to each of these, w…

Do you need a solution to scale your web services both vertically and horizontally, with load balancing and health checking?

A common change to make to a Rails application is to extract an attribute from a model into a one-to-many relationship.

Docker is a great tool to test out new application architectures.

When implementing the Good Enough Recommendations (GER) engine, a core requirement was to let users insert large amounts of data quickly in order to bootstrap the recommendations engine.

While developing the Good Enough Recommendations (GER) engine, I needed to Upsert a record in Postgres.

Recommendation engines could be beneficial for many applications as they can directly add value and lead to greater engagement for users.

There was this time, known as the bad old days, where programmers were seen as the assembly line workers and mechanics.

After some time spent looking at Docker from afar, hearing everyone talk about how awesome it is and how all the cool kids are already using it.

Creating maps to be used in visualisations can be a very difficult task.

I recently picked up a copy of Youtility: why smart marketing is about help not hype by Jay Baer and found it interesting enough to blog about.

Lately I have been learning Redis and experimenting with the features it provides.

Being new to an enterprise organisation, I found that reading Martin Fowlers book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (PoEAA) a cathartic exercise.

Elasticsearch is a great way to store lots of documents that need to be quickly searched and retrieved.

If you want to create visualisations for the web, the tool you will want to learn is D3.js.

The motto for the Royal Society is Nullius in verba, which translates to Take nobody’s word for it.

I recently created a visualisation that showed the difference between rich and poor schools in New Zealand.