Engineering and product leader, occasional photographer.
Something I've realized in my life, whether professionally or in my own projects, is that the projects on which I most enjoy working are those which provide value by making the jobs or lives of others easier. I enjoy working on utility projects, rather than novelty projects. Utility
Following on from my last post I've been migrating more services into EC2 from my current hosting provider. Another task I found myself needing to do was creating swap files for my EC2 instances. This was another task for which I had completely forgotten the step. For my
Recently I've been migrating some of my sites to a new hosting platform. During this process I found myself re-creating configuration for various things, and realizing that I don't quite remember all the steps I took to configure it in the first place. One of
My last post on this blog was in August 2016. That's almost 18 months ago as of this writing. I wanted to post an update and explain why I've basically disappeared from from this site and my open source projects. In September 2016 myself and my
This post is the introduction to a new series which aims to give a walk-through of the Rust compiler, starting from the initial entry point and going right the way through the compilation process. The goal is to give a decent understanding of what exactly is happening behind the
Iota editing itself with syntax-highlighting enabled For the past few months I've been thinking about syntax-highlighting in Iota . I did a good bit of research into how this is acheived in other editors to see how I should go about implementing it for myself. Regex What
Today I discovered the git cherry command which lets you view the commits from one branch which have not been picked into another. Using it is pretty simple: git checkout my-branch git cherry <upstream> <head> Where <upstream> is the base branch, and <
On and off for the past few years I've been working on a text editor called iota . When I set out I had two goals, the first was to learn how text editors worked, and the other was to build an editor that I could use in my
Contributing to the Rust compiler can be a daunting prospect for some. A large code-base, a complex build system and endless tickets means finding a nice starting place can be tough. This article aims to shed light on some of the areas you should be aware of when contributing
Recently I've been spending some time working in a web application written in Rust using the iron framework. Largely it's been a pretty positive experience. There are some areas where the lack of functionality is a bit annoying (sessions, for example), but it also provides a
Recently, my various programming related social news feeds have been filled with, among other things, Rust & Go. Two relatively new players in the arena of the programming language. A number of months ago, I was quite interested in Go. I had played with a few examples, written some small
Today in $day_job I came across an interesting problem. We had a redis process which, after some heavy load testing, locked up and spiked the CPU at a constant 98%. I spent some time working with a colleague of mine in debugging this, and wanted to document some of
Have you ever had that feeling? You have all the motivation, all the ideas and all the enthusiasm in the world. You're finally ready to start on the project . You know the one. The one that you've always wanted to do. You've been thinking
For most of my career thus far, I have been working hard to be faster. To be one step ahead. Work hard, work fast. Productivity was my number one goal. Get as much work done in time time I have available. What if, however, the number one goal was not
I read a great article the other day from Andy Lester. In it, he talked about different ways to contribute to open source projects, without the need to be a programming genius. I thought it was a great article, and agree with all his points. The one part that stuck