Thoughts on State Of Open Con 2023 (2023-02-16)
I managed to get a last-minute ticket to State of Open Conference in London - given it’s convenient for me to get there and given my keen interest in open source it felt like I couldn’t say no! This wasn’t my first tech conference but with the others being programming language conferences I didn’t really know what to expect.
Cgroups Introduction (2022-05-13)
I’ve been working with Linux containers for the last year (primarily using Docker and Podman) and have recently had reason to care about some of the finer details, especially cgroups. This post aims to share some of the knowledge I’ve accumulated!
Pet Peeves in Software Development (2022-03-27)
All software engineers develop their own taste and style, and naturally people form differing opinions. I decided to write down some of my personal pet peeves so that I have a link to point to when these things come up in discussion/review!
Zig NestedText Library (2021-04-18)
This post is going to be a little different to others I’ve written in that it’s consciously aimed at those who may be interested in using NestedText, or users of Zig who are looking for a library for parsing a human-friendly data format.
First Contribution To Zig (2021-03-02)
Recently one of the main things I’ve been intending to learn more about is the Zig programming language. I came across an issue tagged with ‘contributor friendly’ in the issue tracker that seemed approachable and decided I might as well try diving in!
Trying out Zig - Zigominoes (2021-01-10)
Over the last year or so I’ve been tempted to learn Rust as a more modern alternative to C or C++. I did have a go at learning it, but I found myself fighting with it more than I’d hoped. So I decided to try out Zig instead!
First CPython Core Sprint (2020-10-24)
I was very excited to receive an email from Eric inviting me to join the week-long CPython sprint, which took place this week.
Setting Up WSL2 With Ubuntu 20.04 (2020-09-20)
I eagerly decided to try out WSL2 under the promise of massive I/O performance improvements (e.g. running git commands) and a more native Linux feel. This post goes through how I got set up with WSL2, and in particular how I solved network issues when using a VPN.
Issues With Nested Python Virtual Environments (2020-08-31)
This blog post is a by-product of my attempt to script virtual environment creation for one of my Python projects. My setup happened to fall into a case where virtualenv (3rd party) and venv (stdlib) do not play nicely together! In actual fact, I think I hit the same issue in the past without knowing what was going wrong. I did some digging and decided to write up my findings to help anyone hitting the same/similar issues.
Extending Python With Rust (2020-03-30)
People think Python is slow. In actual fact, if you compare to other popular programming languages… it’s true! What some people don’t understand, is the difference between relative speed and being fast enough.
Minegauler (2020-02-12)
See the GitHub repo, or try it out by downloading from here.
The following posts are in a rough state and are subject to change - they may eventually move out of the 'rough' category. Feel free to add comments, but if comments go out of date as the post is updated they may be deleted.
QEMU on Windows (2022-10-09)
This post goes through some basics of getting VMs running using QEMU on Windows.
Cgroups Questions (2022-05-20)
This is a rough post to summarise a few open questions I have about Linux cgroups in the context of containers and running Systemd, following on from my Cgroups Introduction post.
Setting Up A Webex Bot (2021-04-28)
This post contains some rough notes on setting up a basic Webex bot.
Language Design Dreams (2020-11-08)
Have you ever used a language and thought “I wish that worked slightly differently”, or “I wish it had <feature X>”?
CLI Parsing Quest (2020-09-07)
I made a start to a new project. It could end up being a huge undertaking to take it as far as I’d like to, but the hope is that it could actually be useful to people!