I’m the kind of computer person that finds a good thing and sticks with it, and this has definitely been true when it comes to code editors. Vim was my daily driver for ~20 years, and I watched from the sidelines as colleagues experimented with sublime text, vscode, Jetbrains variants, atom, zed, and cursor. Not much Emacs, interestingly. I wasn’t a big vim-tweaker though. I had a handful of well…
2024 was the first year my annual running volume dropped since I started to regularly run, and I backed that up with a 2025 that was even lower - 930km: At the start of 2025 I said : 2025 goals: if I can get on top of these injuries, cover 2025Km (169km/month, 38.9km/week). This feels ambitious and I’m not sure I’ll hit it, particularly as the weeks tick over with this hip issue and I’ll need to…
Back in 2021 I wrote about my experiments adding sorbet types to a rubygem codebase . I remain type-curious in 2025 (particularly now that I’m writing more Typescript than Ruby), enjoying the developer experience benefits of type checking and an IDE integrated Language Server. Sorbet was historically built for application codebases, where a runtime dependency on sorbet was a decision a team could…
In mid 2019 we used a state government subsidy to replace our gas hot water system with an electric heat pump one, planning to power it as much as possible while the sun shines on our solar panels. We chose the Bosch Compress 3000 - here’s a belated review. It’s an all-in-one unit, with the compressor sitting on top of a 270 litre tank. It draws 600W for the heat pump, and there’s a backup heating…
Cost Usage Reports (CUR) are detailed line-item exports of AWS usage. The underlying data matches what’s available in the AWS Cost Explorer, but exported to an S3 bucket where it can be fed into custom reporting and analysis. In 2023 AWS announced CUR v2.0 with new features and a new stable schema with up to 125 columns. For serious analysis and reporting the common setup is parquet files written…
Unlike earlier years , I had no considered running goals for 2024. I went in with a half baked plan to hit 2024km for for the calendar year, maybe via 3+ outings/week averaging ~40km/week. Like previous years, I valued consistency and habit building over distance or time PBs. Sadly, it played out very differently. My cumulative distance chart flattens out several times, all due to injury - each…
In 2020 and 2021 I found it useful to reflect on my running and set new goals, time for 2022. My 2022 goals: get out 156 times - 3 times/week - and cover 1200Km (100Km/month). Both are only incremental improvements on 2021 and that’s OK. Locking in the habit of regular outings is the top goal (presumably around a busier calendar with fewer lockdowns), distance and speed are secondary. Still, a sub…
I enjoyed reflecting on my running progress last year , so here’s another go for 2021. My 2021 goals from the above post: My main goal for 2021 is to continue making running a habit and to get out 104 times - twice per week. Within that I’d also like to run my first half marathon (only 4Km to go!) and cover a total of at least 700Km. Let’s hope the injury gods are on my side. I managed to hit all…
I’m writing less ruby than I used too so I haven’t had much chance to try out sorbet , the type checker built by Stripe. My experience with type checking in golang has made me curious though, and the similar-but-not-sorbet type checking experiments in ruby 3.0 and 3.1 suggest type checking might be part of the ruby landscape going forward. Experimenting on a large codebase at work is tricky…
I’ve dabbled in running for about 8 years, but it was only in 2019 that I went from an on-again off-again attempt to fit exercise in around kids and work to a regular habit that I enjoyed. The tipping point was when 5km became consistently achievable, opening up routes from home with greenery. In 2020 I consolidated the habit and averaged nearly 2 runs per week - a total of 576Km over 90 runs. I…