Idea: e-ink Music tablet
19/04/2022
An idea for a Kindle-type screen for showing sheet music, tablature and the like.
Recipe: Chocolate Mousse
16/04/2022
I attempt to document some of my various culinary creations, starting with a simple chocolate mousse recipe.
Ponderings on (UK) Politics
13/04/2022
A very non-exhaustive look at the current messy state of UK politics, and some thoughts of how things might be improved
Travelling by train is easier than you think
08/04/2022
I decided to try the train for a recent skiing trip in France. Here's how it worked out, and what I thought of the experience.
Progress and Misc Musings - Jan/Feb 2022
06/02/2022
A meandering wander through where my various (mostly work-related) projects are at the moment, and how I'm feeling about things at the moment
Idea - Co-op Rental
06/02/2022
Housing, made and optimised for renters, but run without taking profits
Billionaires, Startups and the Climate Change Conundrum
30/07/2021
Looking at (tech) billionaires as a lens onto the startup ecosystem that created many of them, and whether that ecosystem is the right mechanism for tackling climate change.
Candito 6 Week Program Review
20/05/2021
Powerlifting training progress, and my thoughts on the Candito 6 Week program after running it for around 2 years.
Amazon, a Broken System and Finding Vehicles for Innovation
04/02/2021
An article about Amazon's hold on us, and how to enact meaningful change in a system designed to resist change.
The Environmental Impact of Aviation
06/01/2021
A deep dive into the environmental impact of aviation, and what can be done to make flying less damaging to the planet.
Tech Solutions to the Climate Crisis, and the Dream of a Better World
22/06/2020
Reflections on what a software engineer can do to tackle the climate crisis.
Forging my Future
02/02/2020
I review the past year, ponder what worked and what didn't, and think about what to change for 2020.
Encouraging train travel over aviation
04/07/2019
Why are plane tickets so much cheaper than train tickets, and how do we encourage more people to take the train?
What can we do about Climate Change?
26/06/2019
A rundown of the many and various ways humanity can tackle Climate Change.
A dive into grid-scale Energy Storage options
13/06/2019
An overview of what grid-scale energy storage is, why it is more important than ever, and the many and varied technologies that can be used to implement it.
Carbon Credits and Carbon Offsetting
12/05/2019
In a bid to understand carbon credits and carbon offsetting, I go on a deep dive into the topic, exploring what they are, how they came about, and the various upsides and downsides of the technology.
An Overview of Electricity in the UK
02/05/2019
An overview of electricity generation in the UK, including what the UK's sources of power are, how they've changed over time, as well as a bit of a dive into the history of the electricity sector and the various iterations it has gone through over the years.
Why do I care about Climate Change?
30/04/2019
A kick-off post for my climate change work - why I care about climate change, and what I hope to acheive by focussing on it.
Why lifting?
25/04/2019
A brief meander into why I like powerlifting, and what it means to me.
Why I built this site
25/04/2019
I give in to a long-held desire to build my own site, and ramble about why and how I built it.
The Future
15/03/2019
Trying to figure out what I do next in life, and what feels meaningful to me, after a lot of following my nose.
Fixing a Jupyter kernel connection issue
14/03/2019
Fixing Jupyter kernel connection issues caused by dependencies not doing what they should.
Launching Sublime Text from the Command Line
18/02/2019
A quick how-to on getting the command-line launcher for Sublime text hooked up and working in your shell
What is Data Engineering?
10/12/2018
An overview of Data Engineering - what is it, how does it work, and an overview of some of the main frameworks used.
Rediscovering balance
26/11/2018
Why I've quit my job and am taking some time out from work.
MVP isn't just a buzzword
01/08/2018
Despite my best intentions, I over-engineered a bunch of stuff, rather than talking to the actual users, and ended up wasting a bunch of my time.
Python Mutable Defaults
31/05/2018
I found out why you shouldn't use mutable objects as default arguments in functions, the hard way.
Connecting services behind IAP on App Engine
26/03/2018
Some of the trials and tribulations involved in getting IAP working on Google App Engine (especially when you don't have an extensive full-stack background).
Pickling Problems
29/01/2018
Debugging pickling problems in Spark, thrown up when migrating from Python 2.x to 3
Spline experiments
22/01/2018
Mucking around with randomness and splines in JavaScript, inspired by Inconvergent.
Streaming job logs from Cloud DataProc
08/01/2018
Streaming logs in near real-time from Cloud DataProc jobs as they run, straight to the command line.
Bermann
17/11/2017
After discovering how hard it was to unit-test Spark at any sort of scale, I made a unit-testing framework for Spark RDDs called Bermann.
Monopoly
14/11/2017
Some ponderings on the current state of the internet, and how a few companies are dominating our every waking moment
Cancelling Frozen Shells
28/10/2017
After getting frustrated with SSH sessions freezing if the underlying connection dropped, I dug in further, and discovered a whole extra set of escape commands for SSH sessions.
<3 Python Imports
26/10/2017
Investigating some shenanigans involving relative imports and import ordering in Python modules.
py-dataproc
21/10/2017
I used DataProc extensively, and whilst I loved the service, I hated the auto-generated APIs for Python. So I wrote my own (with blackjack etc).
Overenthusiastic CHOWNership
17/10/2017
I ran sudo chown -R /usr/bin and you wouldn't believe what happened next!