About #

What's this all about? Posts. Lots of them. Maybe too much. I like to write about my tech experiences a lot, so posts will be the main focus of my website.

Why choose a blog? I just think it suits how my brain works. Writing about my interests in blog post style is a good way for me to:

• force me to make my content presentable, simple and to the point
• put it in a format that's easily shareable in the public domain
• have a valuable resource to return to when I inevitably forget how to do something for the 100th time
• create value from all my stupid side projects and silly ideas
• talk to and connect with like minded people around the world!

Hopefully, it will be useful to someone somewhere (I like helping people!), and it will encourage me to keep my standards up. The tech community has given me so much for free, and it's only right that I give something back.

My aim for them is to contain insightful, well-curated and to-the-point information about a particular topic, revised and updated over time. Some will exist simply to share my narrow experiences on a particular topic, however some may take the form of larger walkthrough guides that I have compiled over a long period of time.

So that's the goal... but in reality, this blog is mostly still a brain-dump of every topic I'm interested in, while I frantically try to keep up and organise my thoughts in a presentable way. I do hope you find something useful though.

Blog-driven development? #

I know... the world doesn't need more buzzwords! But I don't know what else to call it and the name stuck with me. How do I define it? A record of all my thoughts, efforts and experiments, meticilously documented and then channelled into public-facing blog post... viola - [[Blog-driven development]]. I don't expect it to catch on :)

Runnable code examples and embedded terminals OMG #

I use embedded code examples in some posts, courtesy of https://repl.it!

I'll also occasionlly throw in some asciinema examples, that mimic a running a process in a terminal.

I think both of the above help with explaining a point, and they're also super fun.

If for some reason you experience funny issues with the embedded elements, e.g. code output seems to be invisible/styled incorrectly, the style elements needed to display them may be blocked by your browser, an addon, or DNS blocking.

The future #

The above list is pretty unstructured. It might be great in future to:

• organise them by tag/category

• organise them by association (graph links)

Like a post? Grab a hardcopy #

If I've done a good enough job with one of my posts, you may feel like it's worthy to have the breath of life breathed into it, and have it printed out somewhere. I've considered putting PDFs of popular articles on https://gumroad.com (using "pay what you want" pricing). Let me know if this interests you!

Other blogs, peeps #

https://github.com/WatkinGoWrong

https://blog.fredericrous.com/

Quotes I like #

"Good programmers write good code; great programmers "borrow" good code; best programmers remove good code." – Mike Gancarz, "The UNIX Philosophy"

"The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women's fashion." - Larry Ellison

"An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field." - Niels Bohr

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the world is that good men do nothing" - widely attributed to Edmund Burke

"You wanna feel better, take a pill. You wanna get right - face the truth" - William Bradford, Numbers (played by Wendell Pierce)

"I saw the trailer. It's very well done. We can see that it is industrial cinema, that there is a lot of money, and that it was very expensive. But if it was very expensive, it must pay in proportion. And that is the problem: There are no surprises. The form is identical to what is done everywhere. The lighting, the acting, everything is predictable." - A completely non-technical quote by Jodorowsky talking about watching the Dune trailer

Other ways to donate #

fosspay, Paypal / patreon / subscribestar / github sponsors / donorbox.orgstripe / dwolla / flattr / wepay / bitcoin (coming soon)