This is a bit of a meandering blog post, which was meant to be about one thing, and then I had to pull in some other bits to give context, and now it feels a little incoherent. However, I do think somewhat that is part of the broader point I'll try to make at the end, about the challenge of solving problems with lots of little bits to them. So sorry, not sorry; but I'll understand if you get bored…
For the last few years I've spent the run up to the festive break working on something graphical, and this year whilst I was a little late to start, I decided to have a go at the Ray Tracer Challenge book by Jamis Buck. This book provides a language-neutral guide to building a classic old-school ray tracer , an art-form that scratches the nostalgic itch for me, as I have vague memories of trying…
Recently I had to give a live demonstration of my declarative geospatial for Python, Yirgacheffe , to an audience of other programmers at the PROPL 2025 workshop . This presented a couple of challenges, not least of all because whilst Yirgacheffe spends a lot of time processing image files (GeoTIFFs), that work is done in large data-science pipelines where it is rare you visualise the data…
It's been a long time since I went to a hackathon. I remember enjoying the first few I went to (my personal blog shows me going to Rewired State first in 2009 and then again in 2010 for Rewired State: Carbon ), but overtime that turned into frustration as I realised that there was rarely any follow through. A lot of people poured out a lot of energy and then there was no consequence. Combine that…
This is a summary of last week's 2025 Nordic-RSE conference , held in Gothenburg, Sweden. Whilst I'm not technically an Research Software Engineer (RSE), a lot of my role involves essentially the same activities in working on ecology pipelines like LIFE , STAR , and so on; indeed I'm a member of the UK Society of Research Software Engineering . Not only do I effectively act as an RSE a good amount…
These are some notes for myself about trying to use Wasm and Web Workers to achieve some level of parallelisation in the browser. This isn't meant to be a comprehensive tutorial, but there are so many broken tutorials or half bits of documentation out there, I thought I should leave myself a note here. This is just the result of an afternoon of spelunking to try and work out how to do this, and…
Background I have three websites (this one, my personal site , and one for my luthiery endeavours ), and despite each starting out with a different technology stack, for the last few years I’d migrated them all to the Hugo static site generator , as a way of making it easier for me to mess around with. Without a fixed database, I could more easily readily structure the content as I wanted it, I…
What has to be a niche of a niche post wise, I was intrigued when I spotted this post recently that someone had built OCaml for Haiku . I'd been playing with Haiku a little recently, as I wanted to understand its file-system, and so I thought I'd have a go. I turns out it's quite simple, and although the above post does kinda tell you what you need, there's a few gaps, so this post is just…
Starting in around 2018 or so I decided to start reclaiming my Internet. Before then, as most people had I suspect, I'd drifted into relying on cloud services for just about everything I could possibly want, but by that year I think it'd become apparent to me that I didn't like relying on other companies as the main host of my digital legacy. There was no one thing, but it seems time and time…
This post is a follow on to the previous part 1 about Tiny Code Christmas 2022 , and is about what I did for TCC 2023. In order to get more info on what TCC is and why it's a fun thing to do, I recommend you start there, but if you're just interested in me messing around with OCaml , then you're in the right place. There were two things that motivated me to tackle this years TCC in the OCaml…