This year’s selection of books is heavily influenced by my travels and interactions this past year. I now live in Melbourne, Victoria, having emigrated here from London, UK in March. I did nonetheless travel a lot. In this review, you will find books inspired by my move and desire to learn more about my new home, its history and its place in the world. You will find books gifted by close friends…
My favourite comedy open-mic, the Loon Under Laughter, is only two minutes from a train station, but it is on a side-street, and drunks and rowdies never seem to find their way there, even on a Friday night. Its punters are a healthy mix of after-work team socials, bemused but adventurous tourists who want to dive in the deep end of a culture, and regular comedy nerds who take up the same chairs…
Bit of a late one this year, but I’ve decided to revisit my “Books of…” series of posts. I’ll keep 2025’s up to date as we go. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers & The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien (reread) Returning to Middle-earth after watching the Rings of Power series proved to be a richer experience than expected (season one, anyway). With a more mature perspective now years after…
Want to see it?? ➡️ Visit Conway’s Game of Life for Ethereum . Since 2014 I have been slowly (very slowly) building implementations of Conway’s Game of Life for different programming languages and technologies . Most recently I set out to write a version of the Game of Life which “runs on Ethereum”. In other words, it’s a Smart Contract. In other words, it’s a Distributed App (Dapp). In other…
Late last year, actress/director/writer/activist Rashida Jones and businessman/developer/philanthropist/uber nerd Bill Gates launched a podcast together, Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions . My first thought on hearing about it was of Mitchell and Webb’s BIG TALK Sketch . Thankfully, the hosts are much less pushy than Raymond Terrific, and the expectations (they are not trying to…
What a year. Thanks to living in the very-outdoorsy British Columbia, and moving in with my girlfriend, I didn’t have quite as much time alone or without things to do as some this year. I barely commuted at all, too, so I barely did any reading. Maybe next year! Three Day Road by Joseph Boyden Finished: 24th May 2020 First indigenous-authored book I’ve read as far as I know. I was given this as a…
Yesterday I faced a version control situation I rarely face. It showed me that I may rely a little too much on the green light from CI tools like CircleCI and GitHub Actions when deciding whether it’s safe to merge a branch. Here’s what happened: My colleague added new expect clauses to a test, plus the code to pass it . They merged this into the main branch via a PR. Later, I forked off of the…
Preamble I have an ongoing project on GitHub to build a collection of implementations of Conway’s Game of Life using various technologies. So far, I’ve done JavaScript, JavaScript with React, Python and Go. My friend Eddie built it in Guile. I do this because t’s fun to have a collection of repos that do the same thing with different technologies. I do this because I really like the Game of Life…
TLDR: fnm is a faster alternative to nvm when it comes to initialising new shell. It isn’t quite as fully featured but it’s worth it IMO. Like many developers, I more-or-less follow the instructions for installing nvm when I set up a new system, in order to be able to switch versions of node quickly. …the script clones the nvm repository to ~/.nvm , and attempts to add the source lines from the…
Read DoneApp Devlog 3 here . Just a small update from last night. I decided today would be the day I got it online somewhere. It was not straightforward, but mainly because my VPS was really out-of-date. As I may have mentioned before I started the API as a Docker-containerised Rails application, which has been nice as far as jumping in and out of work is concerned. It should, in theory, make it…