21 Apr 2020
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blog
For the last few weeks I’ve been in COVID-19 self isolation, and on unpaid
leave, so things have been pretty quiet. My parents, on the other hand, own
a small orchard and are classed as essential personnel, so they’ve been hard
at work picking plums, grading them, packing, and (as the market is closed)
hand delivering fruit around the region, and sometimes shipping boxes further
afield. A lot of the manual labour is unavoidable but the sales and payments
seemed like a lot of wasted work, so I thought I’d try to help with a simple
website where customers could order fruit.
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18 Feb 2019
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blog
Two successful kiteboarding sessions over the weekend! Had a fair bit of stopping and
starting but eventually found the groove and wow, the feeling of being pulled over
the water at high speed by the wind is like flying.
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11 Feb 2019
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blog
Apex Legends is the latest in a genre nearing saturation, amongst “battle royale” shooters
like Fortnite and PUBG. I was struck at just how “good” it felt immediately upon playing it,
and after reading Derek Yu’s twitter thread on “jank”
I started thinking about viewing games through the lens of what they do new and what they
do well.
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28 Jan 2019
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blog
A week with a client looking into some of their software has had me thinking about complexity.
Some older code uses Spring Boot, which was a simplified approach to the complexity of
Spring Framework, which itself was a response to the complexity of J2EE. And yet it’s still
a giant hulking piece of software to use, and while there may be 100 great features it provides,
if we only need 2 of those I think it’s worth remembering that they don’t come free.
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20 Jan 2019
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blog
First week at the new job is done. Three days of intros and meetings and trying to remember names, then two days
on-site with a client. I always enjoy getting a new laptop and setting it up just right, but Friday discovered
we’d have to work inside Windows VMs to be able to access this customer’s intranet. Oh well.
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