Pointless Ramblings

Past years: 2024 Another busy year, pretty much entirely dominated by the new house and arrival of second child.

At old work we did some pretty wild things with Elasticsearch.

I recently started building a thing to help me track, manage and store content and links.

As I age the desire to write things down has (re)grown, particularly yearly notes.

I have refreshed the design again, instead of writing anything.

Literally everything is an abstraction, and I’m not just talking about software.

Becoming a father has radically changed my life (yeah, duh).

I build pyinfra, a tool for deploying infrastructure using Python.

I used to be fixated on the idea of tracking as many hits as possible.

It is somewhat ironic that my last post of 2021 is also my first.

I’ve been putting significant effort into improving the pyinfra documentation as of late.

This post marks the first release of this blog built using Hugo; hopefully nothing looks out of place!

In recent years, the web has been consolidating.

A war has been raging over the last few years between consumers and advertisers.

These days tools to automate, provision or configure servers are dime a dozen.

It’s the end of 2018 and I’ve yet to write a single blog post.

Electron is fast becoming the go-to solution for non-desktop developers who want to build desktop apps.

Recently I’ve been working with Mailchimp’s API.

Dev Write more (blog posts) Push new blog headers every month (incl.

In a world where everything must be distributed across multiple servers, datacenters and continents the task of managing & monitoring server state has become significantly more complex.

I love Docker.

Recently static website generators have been gaining lots of attention.

selected.js is a dependency free <select> replacement.

A long while back I built a built a web app which provided search and aggregated stats for Valve gameservers.

In spite of the risks, I always install the latest OSX betas on my personal laptop/dev-machine.

Since the earliest programming days hackers have benchmarked and compared pretty much every language/software/stack out there.

A couple of months ago, while trundling along the Circle line at snails pace, it dawned on me that I rarely use more than around 5 apps on my iPhone.

Democracy, in the forms it’s employed across the globe, is bullshit.

Over the last three months I’ve been learning how to cook with Chef.

A couple of days ago I saw pngquant appear on Hacker News.

The work-life balance has been discussed a thousand times over; there are hundreds of articles telling you that a good balance is essential for a healthy, fulfilled life and that we should all be careful of becoming overworked and stressed.

I recently started working for EDITD which I am really enjoying.

View on GitHub / View Demo Over the last two days I’ve been writing a small PHP-powered markdown based documentation/wiki/website ‘generator’ called mdoc.

In March 2010, age 18, I rented a low-grade server from Hetzner for just $214/month which I borrowed from my parents (I was living in a Canadian snow/party town on a housekeepers wage).

So we’ve all read about the PRISM scandal and we know that the NSA have some kind of access to our data from a number of large internet based companies.

The first two years of University turned out to be relatively simple (to be honest I was in the lucky position of having covered most of the material prior to arriving).

As part of my final year dissertation I’ve been learning about building web servers & apps using Lua, LuaJIT, LuaJIT+Nginx & Node.

For the last six years this domain has been serving up my blog using Wordpress as the backend.