Breccan McLeod-Lundy's personal blog.
A brief summary of a few of the things we did in Japan rated for Enjoyment and Value. Almost everything was incredibly good value given how cheap Japan is at the moment(Including that a lot of the things we went to have very low admission fees). Tokyo 4 4 Teamlab Planets 5 4 Teamlab was one of my favorite experiences of the entire trip. Especially with a toddler the experiential nature of the…
2020 was tough for many people. For me it included a different challenge although luckily one with a happy ending in the arrival of my son Finlay. My partner Fiona suffered from her waters breaking early, which is medically known as Preterm Premature Rupture of Membranes(PPROM) . From there she ended up spending 10 weeks in hospital followed by Finlay arriving early and having his own 7 week stay.…
After the initial shock of Covid-19, New Zealand can now focus on how we want our industries to develop and what the future holds. We can be purposeful in shaping the work and industries we want to have as a country, or we can just keep reacting to crises as they emerge. If we wait until the crisis has finished to think about changing our economy we will have lost the momentum to make changes and…
Rules-as-code is steadily gaining interest in government as an approach to policy development and implementation ( Ackama has over the last year assisted with several rules-as-code projects at the New Zealand DIA Service Innovation lab). I believe the key value of rules-as-code is a change in the underlying approach to involve software in the development of new rules or regulations. While it bears…
(Note: Ackama staff worked and volunteered on the original prototypes and systems for what is now Whare Hauora who are currently engaged in challenging Kainga Ora’s sensor procurement with a particular focus on privacy issues.) In the last couple of days, there has been public argument on the Kāinga Ora project to put monitoring sensors in NZ state homes. Particular areas of concern being raised…
The obligatory 55 things to do in Europe having just been to Europe post. I've rated all the activities we did that seemed to stand out as "things" in their own right and left general exploring and eating as a score on the city itself, they're pretty close to being in the order that we did them. The first number on each of these is enjoyment and the second is value for money. London 4 2 London was…
New Zealand just had another round of local elections with turnouts so low that it makes the link between elections and the democratic mandate of those elected tenuous at best. Predictably this has led to another round of looking at online voting as the solution to the lack of engagement with local politics. Which is a bit like using a sledgehammer for home repair - it might be possible but…
The week before last I was part of the New Zealand mission to Melanesia visiting Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Both countries are major targets of the New Zealand Aid Programme, with New Zealand involvement and support in areas ranging from police training to tourism. The reception in both countries was very friendly and showed there will be opportunities for New Zealand businesses to engage over…
The New Zealand Government faces a number of challenges at any given time. More and more it turns to technology as the solution to these challenges. Unfortunately, when an organisation has an immediate problem not too much thought is often given to macro level concerns of how the procurement of a solution affects the market and the vendors in it. Given that NZ Government expenditure with third…
Last week I attended the Fintech Festival in Singapore . With over 25,000 attendees, it’s one of the largest financial technology events in the world, bringing together an impressive cross-section of enterprise, startups, and government. With funding from the MAS (Monetary Authority of Singapore) , plenty of sponsors, and ticket sales on top, it was certainly better funded than anything that is…
Having recently attended the Internet Governance Forum in Bali thanks to a fellowship from InternetNZ I have a few personal observations. According to the website the purpose of the IGF is to: "support the United Nations Secretary-General in carrying out the mandate from the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) with regard to convening a new forum for multi-stakeholder policy dialogue".…
Continue growing Rabid - I've got some targets in mind for this, I think we should see some pretty strong growth but I'm not absolutely sure what that will look like. It's also going to be the time that some of our hires are in more varied roles than we have so far, some of which I have less knowledge of how to hire for. Have at least one 20% time project properly see the light of day. Really want…
Achievements Rabid - At the beginning of the year I was intending to do a mix of working on product startups and consulting again to follow on from what seemed like a good base of that kind of work in the previous year. Instead March found a number of opportunities sliding into place to start growing Rabid as a slightly more traditional consulting company with an eye towards releasing products in…
Towards the end of 2010 my hands and arms started aching whenever I worked on the computer for more than a few minutes at a time. After a particularly full on November featuring some work deadlines and Nanowrimo it was bad enough that I was dreading typing. My work reflected this and my output of code and writing decreased dramatically. Even when I felt like the pain wasn't that bad it was easy to…
There is a steady supply of people writing blog posts about how their unique working environment means they're hiring "A players" because of some combination of the following: They only have a four day work week They have a high intensity startup environment with exciting work Everyone has stock Everyone has a profit share 20% Time An onsite chef Everyone works from home The company loves open…
A short collection of my goals for 2012 - publicity helps with these things. Visit at least one new country(I meant to make it somewhere else last year, instead I ended up in Australia again.) Renew Certified Scrum Practitioner certificate. Not really sure how much I value it, but it's cheap to renew and I'd like to try their shiny new test so I can have an opinion on it. Deal with my wrist…
Achievements Railscamp. Organising Railscamp took up quite a bit of time at the beginning of this year but it was worth it. Even better is that there are now lots of people in NZ wanting to help organise future ones. Including the one in Canterbury next month. Speaking. I spoke at various events covering everything from clouds and python to rails and node.js. It's been interesting making it to…
This last weekend was filled with the first Startup Weekend Wellington. Well, it was for some competitors, for me it was a few hours getting a minimum viable product up and running, and then wandering around chatting to interesting people. I decided I liked sleeping. I started the weekend at a bit of a low ebb on energy after a busy week so I decided to join whatever team popped up with the…
It's an interesting experience going to a python conference for me, particularly when I was speaking at it as well. I have done some Python, but I'm mainly a Ruby person, which made there being something of a competition going on between the two, at least in the minds of some of the practitioners, all the more entertaining. It feels very reminiscent of the Emacs VS Vim debate, the languages are so…
Launch day is one of the scariest and most stressful times in web development. Getting everyone on the same page in terms of what's going to happen and when it's going to happen goes a long way in making the entire process smoother. Things are less likely to go wrong and people are less likely to start throwing recriminations around if the processes for deployment and dealing with issues are well…
Steve Blank's the four steps to the epiphany has established itself pretty solidly on the must-read list for entrepreneurs. It's also one of the hardest books in the space to read. Where other authors have spent their time creating pithy lists and easy to apply snippets of information, Steve has written a book that is dense and not particularly suited to skimming. As a book there are all sorts of…
The guys at Envy Labs have created a really great new set of learning materials over at Code School. I've been teaching some people Rails recently and sitting them down in front of Rails for Zombies really worked for them. The idea of mixing short screencasts with convenient practical exercises has been a great way of teaching and the web based format is really quite slick. I wanted to try out…
This is a bit of a dump of the stuff we needed to set up the server and network for Rails Camp NZ. Hopefully it will be of use to others trying to run similar events. Taking over the DNS for the network with Dnsmasq The first and most important part of setting up the server for Rails Camp is making it serve custom DNS records that let you create seamless copies of websites that rubyists needs…
Months of planning culminated last weekend in Rails Camp NZ. I first posted to the Rails Camp Google group with the idea in December 2009 so it's been a while to get every one on board and an event actually happening. The event was from my perspective a success with everyone going away happy as far as I can tell. There were a few hiccups in getting things going properly as we don't have as much in…
Jose Valim is well known in the Rails community for writing a lot of code and being on the Rails core team. He's also to blame for Inherited Resources a plugin that I've seen be more horribly misused than any other. He's one of the most qualified people you could get talking about some of the more advanced tricks that are present in Rails these days and Crafting Rails Applications really does…