Whitfin's Blog

Have you ever installed a Python package thinking you were in a virtual environment, only to realize you accidentally messed up your system installation?

The first v4.x version of Cachex, v4.0.0, has been released.

Update: this post was originally published in November 2017 but has been updated with the latest information and changes as of March 2024.

The activity charts of GitHub are a well known feature; some love them, some hate them.

For those who are unaware, the Titanium SDK has long been a good option for cross-platform mobile development.

Due to a severe lack of both time and motivation, I haven't written much on this site in the last few years beyond occasionally updating my projects page.

I'm sure many of you go to places like the GitHub or GitLab UI to copy the URL to clone a repository.

Update 2023: I'm happy to say that the syntax selected has proven itself as a good choice, and getting used to it really wasn't as much of a pain point as I had anticipated.

When writing a web service, I often lean towards using tools that are as minimal as possible.

Out of the box, Elixir and Erlang offer a very powerful tool for serializing access to a resource via the GenServer included in OTP and surfaced in the Elixir standard library.

This short post is about a small application I wrote to track developer stats, named My Dev Statistics.

During my work life, I spend a lot of time working with MapReduce-style workflows, particularly with Hadoop infrastructure.

During the recent addition of distribution to Cachex, I realised that testing distributed behaviour is quite annoying.

This privacy policy applies to all applications and/or services authored by me personally (Isaac Whitfield), and released under my personal name/identity.

Amazon S3 is a storage solution used by pretty much everyone these days.

If you work with Elixir on web services, you may have come across a library I work on named Cachex.

I recently wrote a post on optimizing Docker images for Rust projects, which turned out to be quite popular, so I figured I'd follow it up with another for those Java developers out there who have to painfully sit through slow Maven builds inside Docker.

Ghost has come a long way since I wrote my first post on safely creating custom Handlebars helpers, but unfortunately not far enough that it's an easy feat.

Amazon S3 is a storage solution used by pretty much everyone these days.

If you work on any kind of backend system, odds are you're familiar with the pains of trawling through files looking for something specific only to discover huge amounts of entries which are basically all the same thing.

This post will be the first of several addressing Docker image optimizations for different project types.

Elixir developers typically conform to the standard of returning Tuple structures from functions which can either succeed or fail in order to effectively signal their status to the caller.

With the introduction of Elasticsearch v5.0.0, Elastic began to recommend moving to their new REST client for server interactions rather than the transport client that was shipped previously.

A little over a year ago I began working on what would become my first real project in Elixir.

Disclaimer: I should point out that I wrote this project for those who are already working with Elixir and have need of integrating their existing codebases with Hadoop.

Hi there, I'm Isaac, welcome to my blog!

Erlang (and by extension, Elixir) comes with a sweet little memory storage library called ETS (Erlang Term Storage).

After recently discovering SipHash when searching for a solid algorithm to use in another project, I decided to take a shot at writing an implementation in Elixir as an exercise (having only started picking up Elixir in the last few weeks or so).

Say hello to Oryx.

Streams are one of the niceties provided in JDK 8 and they provide extreme flexibility to the user.

This is as much for my reference as anyone else's, so I hope everything is clear enough for newcomers.

Recently I have somehow found myself in need of using JavaScript dot notation to represent values a bit too often to bother constantly rewriting the code for it.

I'm fairly new to Handlebars, the templating system that the blogging system Ghost uses, but my initial impressions are that it's a pretty sweet tool to use.

You may be aware of the *nix tool uniq, used to filter duplicate values from within files.

Nowadays people are using Mocha more and more for testing their JavaScript/NodeJS code.

After working with NodeJS, Streams have always been an annoyance for me in Java (especially when I was first learning), simply due to the fact that you had to wait for the input to buffer and be fed through the abstract read() method of the InputStream in…

Until recently, I was a big fan of using Subversion for most of my private projects.

Sorting an object is one of those little things which nobody ever considers useful to know (until it becomes so), but it's proven particularly useful to me in the last few months - not necessarily for the comparison of two objects at runtime (which, thank…

One of the most lovable (yet frustrating) things about JavaScript and Node.js is the use of Asynchronous functions and the callback based system.

I figured this was probably something that people might find useful as when searching for a possible solution myself I came across a massive Google groups post with no good on how to remap the power button on an Android device!