tomm.org

I thought removing Meta from my life would be too hard, especially WhatsApp.

“This is bullshit”, Marc Lewandowski quite rightly said when his ballot arrived in Melbourne with just three days to get back to the UK before polling day.

I was pretty excited about finding a project that would give me an excuse to learn Rust.

I love my data and do everything I can to keep it.

Dear Dara, At the end of a long day of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the dawn of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement at Zurich Pride, my boyfriend and I ordered an Uber to go to a nearby gay bar.

“I agree with Jacob Rees-Mogg” are words I never expected to pen.

Moving to a new city for a new job is a good time for reflection and an opportunity to make some adjustments.

The original plan was Land’s End to John O’Groats.

As you may have noticed, I’ve so far failed to write about my South American adventures.

It’s with a very slightly sore head I write this final chapter in the diary of my pedal from Porto to Munich.

I’m really not in the mood for writing this but here goes.

It’s a shame I’m penning my update for the three most dramatic days of cycling under the cloud of the EU referendum result.

My inner dread probably isn’t coming across to any of the other cafe-dwellers enjoying their morning fix.

Sleepy, pretty towns are two-a-penny throughout the south of France.

One of the great things about travelling is the random decisions you make that have wonderful outcomes.

A quick update from me today as I didn’t quite find time to write this yesterday on my rest day, but am hammering it out over breakfast as a 130 km ride looms.

After following Camino de Santiago a bunch of the way so far, albeit in reverse mostly, the last three days saw me heading to the north coast through a stunning national park.

First off, an update on the Garmin relationship.

We started the day so well-paced, but then as the kilometres ticked along you started outpacing me.

Today’s post is dedicated to the amazing Spanish car drivers.

Phew.

Well here we are.

Dear Tom, Sat here in April 2016, having spent the last few years inventing my time-travel letter posting machine in my spare time, I'm going to test it by sending you—well, 2011 me in fact—some words of wisdom for the years ahead.

We've all done it.

The first time I get asked for a list of things I share that list with whoever asked for it.

In a little over a week’s time, I’m going to be heading to Paris on the Eurostar, only to cycle back to London.

If you've read a few of my posts, you'll know how much I love AWS.

You know the score: you skim-read a bunch of articles on Hacker News and one catches your attention.

At work we use Puppet to keep our server configuration, and therefore ourselves, sane.

It was last Monday afternoon that it suddenly dawned on me.

I finally got to play with Java 8 streams and lambdas in more than a "Hello, World" way a couple of weeks ago.

To make things snappier for web clients, all our APIs at work support CORS.

We have a flexible working policy at work.

I've lost count of the number of times I've had to dig out a link to the JSON prettifier Chrome extension I use, having been asked "which JSON prettifier is that?"

I read with interest Amazon's recent announcement about the new T2 range of instances with burstable performance.

A new competitor to Team Sky has recently emerged from the heart of Bloomsbury.

Today I was going to write about the inaugural Team MetaBroadcast ride we recently went on.

I love getting out on my bike at the weekend to enjoy what the countryside of Surrey has to offer.

TL;DR: keep a copy of the HTTP spec nearby at all times.

Security is always about making trade offs, and credential storage is one such case where you need to juggle usability against security.

We spend a lot of time writing APIs at work: not only our external ones in the form of Atlas (the video and audio index) and Voila (our media product engine) but also the many internal ones which provide data to them and our other products.

We recently had a discussion in the office on when the decorator pattern should be used, and when the template pattern may be better.

It’s the little things that make all the difference.

Every so often I find myself needing to connect VisualVM, a JVM profiling and debugging tool, to a JVM running remotely in EC2.

As anyone who’s read Joshua Bloch’s Effective Java will know, immutable classes are generally considered to be a good thing.

I rode from London to Paris.

I think it’s fair to say that the third and final day of cycling wasn’t as smooth as it could’ve been.

With the ferry leaving at 11pm and arriving at 4am local time in Dieppe, we hoped for a little sleep.

It feels a bit like deja vu, all over again.

As the midday bells rung out across Parliament Square, with the sun beating down, we began our journey.