Yesterday I attended my first TEDx here in Birmingham. It was an amazing collection of topics covering everything from gravitational waves through to food start-ups in Detroit. I can wholeheartedly recommend finding your nearest one and going. What follows is a big pile of links, none of which are related to TED, but which I’ve been meaning to get out for a while. Continue reading »
May Link Dump
Yeah, I haven’t done this for a very long while. In between writing a lot of words and fixing a lot of systems, my Instapaper queue has just been growing and growing. So here’s three dozen links to stuff I’ve found interesting so far this year sans descriptions. Continue reading »
My First Buck
When I was eight, I wrote some words on an aging RM laptop using Word 97. They were terrible words and they ran together to form an even more terrible sentence. But it was the first ‘thing’ I had created with a plot, characters and a purpose and I have continued ever since; through terrible fanfics, introspective ramblings and enough robots and aliens to thoroughly exhaust the subject, I’m still putting words on digital paper. So far, five months into 2016 I’ve written a few sentences shy of 100,000 words.
And last week I received my first payment for it. Continue reading »
The SVN Server
Nowadays I take it for granted that everything is in git. Even my Uni dissertation was stored in a git repo. But this is a story of the first time I was exposed to source control, back when SVN was the top dog, and someone had a genius idea of how to set it up on a server. Continue reading »
Take A Break
It happened again. It got towards the end of the financial year and I had a large chunk of remaindered holiday to take. Last year I was in San Francisco but this year I just wanted to do nothing. Continue reading »
An Old Portfolio
My “business” site, as in the place I don’t ramble on about code and movies and the world, has been a bit neglected recently. I say recently, but the last update was at the start of this decade and since then it has received nery a touch. Continue reading »
Turning Ten
Ten years ago I decided to take a domain I had registered the year before and put it to good use. I replaced my homebrew CMS (the second version) and replaced it with the freshly released WordPress 2.0 along with a new design. Continue reading »
The Hot Path
A few years ago I had a problem. An API, consuming a dozen microservices, needed to scale and not just by an order of magnitude or two. It needed to handle a load far greater than it was originally intended for. How to do it? Continue reading »
2016 Links
We’re half way through the first month of 2016. Just 343 days until Christmas. Now that’s sunk in, here’s a dump of all the links I meant to post over Christmas but was too busy eating chocolate/not driving off the road in Iceland to post. Continue reading »
Twenty Fifteen
I haven’t done one of these since 2012, so I thought it’d be good to do a recap. This’ll be short and quick, no ranking, just what I remember of 2015. Continue reading »
