Recent content on Rory Hart
A weekly look back at Hacker News coding centric posts from 5 years ago. You Might Not Need jQuery 994 points | 352 comments jQuery and its cousins are great, and by all means use them if it makes it easier to develop your application. If you’re developing a library on the other hand, please take a moment to consider if you actually need jQuery as a dependency.
A weekly look back at Hacker News coding centric posts from 5 years ago. Why I’m Betting on Julia by Evan Miller 493 points | 252 comments In this post Evan talks about why Julia captured his attention, a reason he points isn’t one that the “language geeks” would have. Normally I use one language to make something work, and a second language to make it fast, and a third…
Applications like Instapaper and Pocket are fantastic, both as libraries of content but as anti-distraction mechanisms, collecting content for later. I have been using applications like this for a very long time and needless to say I have built up quite a backlog, the oldest unread article dates back to mid-2014. Recently I have put an effort into catching up on this backlog and it has made me…
I have been experimenting with integrating the Amazon API Gateway and Red Hat’s Keycloak (more on these experiments to come). The API Gateway has a few ways to authenticate & authorize with the obvious one being to use Amazon Cognito. However since Feb 2016 you have been able to use Amazon Lambda functions as Custom Authorizers. When configured in API Gateway along with a HTTP header such as…
PyCon AU was held in Melbourne again this year and I had the pleasure of being on the organizing committee. While my only responsibility at the conference was to work with the awesome sponsors of the conference I did feel a little stressed the first day. This wasn’t helped by the committee chair Richard Jones coming down with gastro the night before the conference. However the treasurer Ryan…
I’ve been catching up on some podcasts while catching up on tasks around the home this past week. One of them is Software Engineering Radio, which unsurprisingly is about software engineering. The podcast invites on a lot of well known guests to talk about their experinces and their opinions. Follows are some recent ones I have particularly enjoyed. James Lewis on Microservices If you have…
Today I attended a full day workshop presented by Sam Newman and Scott Shaw on micro-services. Most people seemed pretty up with the why of micro-services, if you’re not James Lewis and Martin Fowler have talked at length on the subject. The workshop covered a wide range of topics and gave an excellent overview of the how and what of micro-services, something which is still lacking in…
I’ve set myself the goal of attending one software meetup per week. I enjoy attending conferences, and meetups are like micro-conferences. You meet people, you learn something and often there is beer and food at the end like this evening. This evening I attended Infracoders (http://www.meetup.com/Infrastructure-Coders/), a devops group focused on tools that make devops easier and more fun.…
I’ve been messing around with Constraint Programming (CP) the past week. A few people at work have tried it out on some real world problems lately but it didn’t seem to stand up when given a lot of data and variables. This seemed sad as the declarative nature of CP attracts me and it strikes me there must be a set problems that it could be used for and it deserved a look.
All the excitement over the Rails and Github hack reminded me about Scott Meyers (author of Effective C++ et al.) who has talked about the subject of interface design many times (including in the aforementioned book) and his perspective puts the ball squarely in the Rails team’s court. Let’s make the reasonable assumption that your clients—the people using your interfaces— are trying…
Last weekend we hiked through the Alpine National Park to Lake Tali Karng with our friends Cath & Rob, it was beautiful and turned into a slight misadventure. Rob is a dedicated hiker and Cath is fairly experience as well, whereas Li and I are pretty inexperienced, I haven’t hiked since high school & the scouts. So we this in mind we planned an easy two day hike, downhill all the way in an…
My new project (Relishment) is an opportunity for me to experiment with different technology. In this case I decided to switch to PostgreSQL from the RDMS I am familiar with MySQL. So after struggling to learn the user management system in PostgreSQL, ”Ident authentication failed” was stumping me for a while, I finally got Django connected to a database. The next step was to run the…
1. Hacker News I habitually go to hacker news a few times a day, the people are intelligent and the discussion is the right mixture of coding, entrepreneurial and geek. It is also the first site I’ve consistently commented on, the karma feedback from writing an insightful comment is quite effective. 2. Startup Lessons Learned I work as the head of development at a startup and I refer to this…