Categories

elixir

Functional Programming (Over?) Simplified

4 minute read

Introduction Since changing track from being a macOS application developer to being an Elixir developer a few people have asked me about functional programm...

Ecto and Binary IDs Generated By PostgreSQL

2 minute read

Version Info: Elixir 1.7 / OTP 21, Ecto 3.0 and Postgres 10 I want to use UUIDs as the primary keys in an Elixir system I am developing but struggled to fin...

Five Great Things About Elixir

8 minute read

Introduction My career as a developer has evolved through various languages and platforms during the last 20-something years and for the last decade I’ve mai...

Grokking Elixir

7 minute read

Introduction Late last September I started being interested in Elixir. As the website says, “Elixir is a dynamic, functional language designed for building s...

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health

Choosing A New Bike

4 minute read

After realising that my weight and fitness were in a bad way again I turned my attention to researching bicycles. I have had a varied history of bike owners...

My Bicycle History

5 minute read

The Roses This isn’t a bike model but rather my first memory of cycling. I was probably five or six and it was a hot summer day and so I was just wearing sh...

Weight and Health

1 minute read

In four months I turn 48. I am 5’8” (173 cm) and weight 15st 10lb (100kg). I am unfit and have a very sedentary lifestyle because I work from home as a softw...

The Depressed Developer

3 minute read

I’ve moved the conclusion from the end to the top. If you only have one minute, read this bit and ignore the rest. Whatever work you do, but particularly if...

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linux

My tmux Notes

2 minute read

These notes are my personal cheat sheet for using tmux. Whilst my configuration changes some key bindings, the ones below are the defaults in case I need to...

NixOS, Phoenix and Sass

3 minute read

Elixir’s web application framework, Phoenix, is moving away from needing a dependency on Node to make projects easier to maintain and thing in general just a...

My Linux Life

6 minute read

Introduction After I wrote about my love of StarLabs’s 11” laptop, the StarLite, someone asked me about the software I run on it, how I work with people who...

The StarLite Laptop

2 minute read

I do pretty much all of my development work on my desktop computer but I still need a laptop for those times I just want to work from the sofa or for when I ...

Unchaining Data

4 minute read

Introduction Plain text files are very portable. There is no tie-in to any particular editor or application or even operating system. The problem is that mo...

The Month of Linux on my Desktop

2 minute read

Introduction One month ago I wrote about trying Linux for work. A fair amount has happened since then so I thought I’d post a quick update. The Hardware I...

The Year of Linux on my Desktop?

4 minute read

Introduction Last week I decided to scratch an itch and tried using Linux for the first time in about 15 years. I wanted to see if would be possible to do m...

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miscellaneous

The NASberry Pi

7 minute read

A What Now? I wanted to try creating my own NAS using a Raspberry Pi and NVMe drives. This post goes over what I have did to get it up and running. (The ar...

From Digital To Physical Media

4 minute read

This morning the YouTube algorithm suggested a video called “Wait, what happened to HMV?” to me. It covered the decline and then revival of the company and e...

15 Years of Twitter

less than 1 minute read

Today marks 15 years since I signed up for Twitter according to a notification they pushed to me. It seemed like the perfect time to delete my account, part...

My Twitter Wind-Down

2 minute read

Last Friday Twitter disabled the API keys of the major Twitter clients, including Tweetbot, my client of choice, with no notice, and no communication with th...

My Git Notes

1 minute read

This blog post is a personal reference in that I wanted to document the Git commands I use the most now that I use the command line more and more. I am publi...

Mastodon

2 minute read

If you use Twitter and are seeing this blog post then there is a good chance you know that Mastodon is an alternative social network which is similar to Twit...

Keep Moving

2 minute read

“We all change. When you think about it we’re all different people all through our lives. And that’s okay, that’s good, you’ve got to keeping moving so lon...

From Evernote to Notes

4 minute read

Introduction I have been using Evernote for several years and I pay for a Premium plan because I need to use more than two devices and some of my attachments...

Traveling Light

3 minute read

I’m off to China for a week-long business trip soon and, because I didn’t want to take my MacBook Pro with me (amongst other things, for privacy and security...

Perspective Is Terribly Important

3 minute read

Over the last 24 hours or so a news story (see the links to some of the coverage at the end of this post for examples) has been developing regarding ‘tagging...

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python

Python Resources

3 minute read

Introduction Whenever I start learning a new programming language I like to find good book and blog authors, good conference videos (and ideally find confere...

Pip and Virtual Environments

4 minute read

Introduction The contents of this post are based on a blog post written by Jamie Matthews which is called, ‘A non-magical introduction to Pip and Virtualenv ...

Visual Studio Code for Python Development

4 minute read

Introduction This blog post gives a brief overview about how I’ve settled on using Visual Studio Code for Python development and describes the basic configur...

New To Python

1 minute read

I recently started teaching myself Python and decided that documenting some of my experiences and discoveries would be a good way to revitalise my blog. Thi...

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