Writing

Week of 18 March

  • I spent some of the weekend taking out some of the kitchen and bathroom installations in the new place. Most of it was simple enough, with just a handful of stubborn screws, and there are just a handful of pieces that are attached to someth...

My Home Screen for March '24

My Home Screen for March '24 Shrinking down the music widget and bringing in a couple more apps β€” specifically Mail. I tried opening it with a swipe down & search, but I have been using it more and more this last month, so it gets ...

Week of 11 March

  • I spent some of the long weekend over at the new place pulling out more fixtures. We're just down to the bathroom and kitchen now which I should be able to do next weekend before we get some people in to rip out and dispose of the walls...

Week of 4 March

  • Summer seems to be back again this week! We've had a streak of a couple ~30Β° days this week. While I normally welcome the heat, I was kinda hoping to get stuck in to some work in the new place, which is (at the moment) lacking any cooli...

Week of 26 February

  • What a mixed week! This week was bookended with 2 pretty wild events.
  • On Monday night, I flew in to Melbourne in preparation to go see Blink-182 on Tuesday evening.
  • On Tuesday, we managed to do a run through of a major database upgrade in a...

Week of 19 February

  • It was a warm one this week! Perhaps summer giving its last hurrah before we dive in to the chill of a Canberra Autumn!
  • Work has been quite stressful these last few weeks β€” I'm leading the upgrade of a service that is central to our pla...

Week of 12 February

  • Lots of catchup this week, post company offsite! It was also my last official week as a team lead! I'm very much looking forward to being able to focus on the technical success of the team and partnering with some other folks to fill th...

My Home Screen for Feb '24

My Home Screen for February'24

(Ignore the unreads β€” I will reply to them at some point!)

  • Obsidian is a staple, notes used to be my go to, but I've found so much more utility with Obsidian.
  • A couple of shortcuts for posting to th...

Week of 5 February

  • Abby and I spent this week in Melbourne β€” we both had work things that both happened to land this week. It was the first tome we stayed in the CBD since we lived there and I don't think either of us miss the madness of it all.
  • My work t...

Week of 29 January

  • Busy week this week ahead of our work's offsite next week, trying to get a bunch crammed in before a week of interruptions, oh and it's performance review time πŸŒ€
  • I made a joke just before I started painting and doing up my office, t...

Week 52 β€” Year of blogging regularly!

  • This post marks a year of updating this site on a regular (pretty much weekly) basis! As the year has gone on, I have been thinking about how to title these posts. For the past year, it has been week number followed by some theme from the w...

TIL: Testing actions in Hanami 2

I was pairing with a colleague this afternoon at work on trying to test an action in Hanami 2 where we explicitly needed to read the body of the request.

The action looked something like this:

class MyAction < Action
    before_action ...

Week 51 β€” Back to it

  • First week back at work started off hot! Back to back meetings and onboarding new folks is one way to jump-start the old memory :D Thankfully I had written up some decent notes so I could ramp up pretty quickly!
  • This weekend was a weird one...

Week 50 β€” Holiday's end

  • It was a quiet week this week :) I spent the first half of it cleaning out and re-painting my home office. The walls were an odd yellow colour β€” which no longer matched the colour of the rest of the house. Thankfully, the walls were in pret...

Week 49 β€” Birthday week

  • I had this week off work and have been holidaying & catching up on some life admin things.
  • I managed to catch The Boy and the Heron before its run ended in Canberra this week. I have been a fan of Miyazaki's work since I saw Spirite...

Week 48 β€” Smell ya later 2023 ✌🏽

  • We did it. We made it through 2023! onwards to all the great* things 2024 has to offer us.
  • This week has been pretty relaxing! More relaxing than usual for the week between Christmas and the New Year.
  • Christmas day was lovely (a little sto...

Week 47 β€” It's Christmas time, again

  • What a week! I was hoping for a quiet fade out to the end of the year β€” but as with most things this year β€” it was not meant to be! The week started off with a precautionary incident response that needed to happen across multiple teams. The...

2023 Tunes!

This year I tried my darndest to Scrobble more to last.fm like it was 2008. This was made difficult by how tricky scrobbling from modern streaming services is. If anything is to count as a scrobble, it needs to be in the your "library&q...

Week 46 β€” The final countdown!

  • It's the last week of the work year! And with it comes the mayhem of trying to wrap everything up lest it's forgotten in the ~2-3 weeks between now an when we get back to it.
  • Barkly was feeling a bit poorly earlier in the week. When...

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 9

More camels and oasis-es, less cards.

In this puzzle, we're using our trusty Oasis And Sand Instability Sensor β€”Β OASIS β€” to analyse our surroundings.

The OASIS produces a history for each value, and we need to extrapolate the next valu...

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 8

Another fun one!

Today's puzzle had us navigating a sandstorm. Our map, a set of directions, through what looked like a graph.

Starting at AAA, we want to get to ZZZ following the R, then L item each iteration β€” starting from R again i...

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 7

Day 7 saw us playing cards, on camels β€” camel cards!

Camel cards are like poker. But simpler, so you can play it while on a camel.

The hand-rules are similar to Poker, but with a few changes β€” which is ace, because I have no idea what the ...

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 6

Catchup time! πŸ˜… Time for day 6 β€” on day 11.

Today's puzzle has us racing boats. But not any boats, toy boats that are wound up with the hold of a button. The longer the button is held, the higher their speed. So holding the button for 3...

Week 45 β€” All the celebrating!

  • I spent part of this week in Melbourne, and I think 3 days or so is the perfect amount of time when I'm also travelling in to the office each day. Any more and the exhaustion sets in from not being used to the commute πŸ˜….
  • I caught upon ...

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 5

Please, my CPU, it needs help!

A classic entry for AoC, in which there is a brute-force option that will melt any CPU.

Today's puzzle was fun! But also frustrating.

The setup is you need to work out the best place to plant some seeds....

Advent of Code 2023 β€” Day 4

My favourite so far!

Inspired by some folks at work, I decided to try and do this as functionally as possible.

Apparently there are some similarities with past puzzles, but I, for the life of me, cannot remember any of the puzzles of years...

Advent of Code β€” Day 3

And so the painful puzzles begin!

Today's puzzle revolved around an ascii schematic and we were tasked with parsing it and finding adjacent elements in the map.

These ones always trip me up for some reason β€” and I think it's becaus...

Authenticated routes with Hanami 2

As I was building out the admin area of this blog, I wanted to make sure only authenticated people could hop in an edit things.

The first iteration of this, was based on HTTP BasicAuth. To get this to work, I built a small module that uses ...

Week 44 β€” Beginning to wind it up

A productive week this week as the year starts to wind down! I am off to Melbourne in a few days, so super excited to go see some friends and family :)

I have been doing a bunch of work on this site over the weekend β€” mainly styling updates...

Advent of Code β€” Day 2

Onwards! To day 2.

(at least until the rest of the end-of-year things start getting in the way β€” which normally happens at around day 6)

Started reading this one thinking we'd be getting in to probabilities β€” thankfully that's not ...

Advent of Code β€” Day 1

Advent of Code is one of my favourite times of year. Partly for the puzzles, and partly because it's a sign the year is winding up. Like 24 ways to impress your friends and UXmas before it, Advent of Code is an advent calendar, where eac...

Week 43 β€” Big max

The December is screaming over the horizon and in to view, and with it, the many plans and things that need to happen by the magical time of "the end of the year". One of the plans I am looking forward to is taking off to Melbourne...

My desks over the years

I was poking through my photo library this evening and thought it'd be fun to share some of the photos I had taken of my desk over the years!

There's a pretty big gap between 2012 & 2017 β€” I am pretty sure I have photos of these...

Week 42 β€” Spending more time with Hanami 🌸

  • I made a couple of updates to this site this weekend. Mainly some behind the scenes things to update Hanami to 2.1.0rc2 and to bring some of the core pieces in line with what will be generated when 2.1.0 ships! A couple of highlights:

Week 41 β€” 10-ex-productivity

  • It's finally starting to feel like summer here now! I've been wearing shorts and a t-shirt for most of the week. It's nice not not be freezing all of the time, but I would trade that for the garden not being burnt to a crisp!
  • It...

Week 40 β€” A lot of nerding out

  • I started reading Berserk this week to have something not-so-serious to read for a change. I didn't realise just how much popular culture was inspired by it! There is literally a panel in the first volume that may as well be the cover o...

Week 39 β€” πŸ‘»

The weather was slightly better this week β€” no need for busting out the space heater at least!

The last few weeks have seen a steady increase in halloween decorations around the neighbourhood. Nothing crazy and over the top, but some pretty...

Week 38 β€” A full house

It's been freeeezing in Canberra this week! I had to turn the little space heater on on my office a couple of times this week β€” even after putting on a bunch of layers! The exception being the stunning days we had this weekend.

Abby is ...

Week 37 β€” A change is as good as a holiday

  • For a couple of years we've been subscribed to Thieves coffee. They ship us a kilo of coffee roasted for filter each month, and each month is a new roaster! So it's a great way to check out a bunch of different roasters. Abby recent...

Week 36 β€” 🐣

Abby is off to the UK for the next 2 weeks. So it's just been me and the dogs kicking about at home. The last time she was overseas while I was at home was before the pandemic when she was posted overseas for a few weeks. Back then, it w...

Week 35 β€” ADST, we've missed you

  • Week 1 with the new iPhone down, and it has been really nice! I didn't think I would adjust to the size as quickly as I did, and it is super nice to be able to type with both hands and use PiP and still see what is playing πŸ˜….
  • macOS Sono...

Week 34 β€” Ooo shiny

  • Happy new iPhone and new iOS week to all who observe! I have been holding off upgrading my phone for a few years now. I picked up a 12 mini at the height of the pandemic (when going too far from a charger was not all that frequent) and have...

Week 33 β€” 🫠

  • This week has been a planning week at work, along with the regular things that we need to keep on top of. And while I do enjoy being prepared for what is to come, it can be tricky to balance introducing and thinking about new work, with try...

Week 32 β€” Back to normal

  • This week, I finally feel like I'm back in the swing of things! But we'll see how long that lasts as we're getting in to planning for the next quarter at work (and Abby is off overseas in the next few weeks).
  • I have been chippin...

Week 31 β€” Something need doing?

  • This week was our first week back at work post-holiday. What a shock to the system πŸ˜…! While nothing at work was on-fire, there were several days in the week where I thought to myself "was I able to do all of this before" β€” it was ...

Week 30 β€” New Zealand pt. 2 and back home

  • We spent the first half of this week in New Zealand, wrapping up the rest of our trip from last week.
  • On Monday we drove out to Rotorua β€” a city with seemingly infinite geothermal activity. Local parks have fenced off geothermal pools, our ...

How I write this blog on an iPad

For the longest time, I have wanted to be able to write with just an iPad, with markdown, in some native text editor and not need to copy and paste text in to a WYSYWIG.

My previous attempts included: - WordPress; which was okay. Though it ...

Week 28 β€” Another birthday weekend

  • Short week at work this week. This quarter's refresh day fell on Monday. It was sunny up in Canberra, so I used it to clean the fly screens and do some other outdoor tidying. On Thursday morning, I flew in to Melbourne and met some coll...

Update 1 β€” G'day mate

The first few weeks of any new project are always the most exciting! When exploration and problem solving us abundant, and suffering for decisions of yesterday is scarce.

Over the last few weeks I have been putting together a small app to h...

Week 27 β€” Blues and travelling

  • We're getting ready for a couple weeks of holiday in the coming weeks! It'll be the first time we've had a proper holiday since 2017, and I am so excited! There are no concrete plans, other than get on a plan to New Zealand, pic...

Week 26 β€” File > New Project

  • I started a new iOS project this week to help out Abby's sewing hobby (but also to take a look at some of the new things with SwiftData). The last project I started with SwiftUI was a re-write of Mercury, but CoreData proved to be a rig...

Week 25 β€” Social times

  • I caught up with a colleague from Melbourne and their partner this week for lunch, and it was lovely! Lunch time hangs and unscheduled social time are some of the things that I miss the most about "working from the office". There ...

Week 24 β€” Excited about events

  • Almost half way through the year, and half way through winter! This weekend was a beauty here in Canberra. It was sunny as usual, but we had a couple of days of weather warm enough to leave some windows and doors open. Now this is probably ...

Week 23 β€” Playdate

My playdate arrived while I was in Melbourne last week! I pre-ordered it when they opened back in 2021, and it was absolutely worth the wait! The hardware itself so solid and adorable and the OS is whimsical AF. It shipped with a couple of g...

Week 22 β€” Thank you MEL

  • Another week in Melbourne in the books! I spent this one mainly visiting family and working. The last time I was down, my team was all of 3 people. It has since gained 4 more, so I took this chance to meet almost everyone (thanks again COVI...

Week 21 β€” Melbourne time

  • This morning I flew out to Melbourne. I have a habit, when travelling, to get to wherever I need to be well in advance of the suggested arrival times. So if an airline is asking me to be at the gate ~40 mins before departure, I am usually t...

Week 20 β€” Stay a while and listen

I've been playing through Diablo IV this weekend β€” so far it has surpassed my expectations! Aesthetically, it feels much more like a direct sequel to Diablo II, than Diablo III. The whimsy of Diablo III was interesting at the time, but ...

Week 19 β€” *Skippy sounds*

It's been icy this week! So much so that most mornings have involved frosty grass (which is always entertaining to see the dogs walk on before they realise how chilly it is).

It's also another short week as we celebrate(?) the King&...

Week 18 β€” Discovering Hyrule

The weather this week was suuuper weird! It's like Autumn was throwing out one last hurrah. After a couple days of -6Β°C last week, we had some pretty warm ones this week. So much so that I had to carry my jacket on my walk to the shops! ...

Week 17 β€” So long, Mercury

I took down Mercury from the iOS App Store this week and have opened a PR to remove it from the Mastodon marketing site. I built it in my spare time over ~2018-2020, then hit a bunch of App Store Review roadblocks. With the inability to addr...

Week 16 β€” Four more months!

This week's post marks 4 months of weekly posts! I have never really gotten in to the habit of writing (as much as I have wanted to), but I have found that even just writing these weekly posts has made it easier to get in to the habit of...

Week 15 β€” Hiyah!

It's Tears of the Kingdom time! I played the heck out of Breath of the Wild, and am so excited for this instalment in the series. I am not usually a fan of open world games, but that's usually because there's only a small section...

How I debug with Ruby

Over the many years that I have been working with Ruby, I have never really learned to use a debugger, and really only lean on tools like Pry to start a REPL session at a particular line in some Ruby code. From there, I reach for Ruby's ...

Week 14 β€” Blog updates

  • Regular length week this week ;)
  • I have been adding some behind the scenes features to this blog. Up until now, I have been using a handful of micropub clients, and some Ruby scripts to publish and manage posts. This has all been working we...

Week 13 β€” Another longie

  • Yet another long weekend, making for a short week :D Though I think this is the last longie for a little bit now. This time, we were off on account of ANZAC day. The public holiday fell on a Tuesday this year. Some folks took the Monday off...

Week 12 β€” Layoffs

  • This week has been rough on many fronts. Layoffs at work have meant we have lost some of the most brilliant people I have had the chance to work with. Some had been with us for a good chunk of their career and the company's life. It'...

Week 11 β€” Easter

  • Another short week this week on account of Easter, which was nice! Speaking of, Greek Easter is this weekend β€” so Ξ§ΟΞΉΟƒΟ„ΟŒΟ‚ Ανέστη to all who celebrate :D
  • I've been working on clearing out all of the brush around our shed over the last fe...

How I use Obsidian

I've been using Obsidian for a little while now. At first, it was largely just a replacement for Notes.app, like Ulysses before it, I preferred it purely because I could see the markdown files that it was saving. As time went on though, ...

Week 10 β€” Double digits πŸŽ‰

  • I've been trying to get back in to scrobbling things I listen to to last.fm again. Partly so I can display the week's top track at the bottom of these posts, but also because I looked back at my scrobbles from 2008-2009 and found so...

Week 9 β€” Pizza time

  • We've recently purchased an Ooni pizza oven πŸŽ‰. Our closest Good Pizza Placeβ„’ is a 40min round trip away. Which is fine if we can eat in, but because the pizzas are so thin, they travel incredibly poorly! We used to have a pizza stone fo...

Week 8 β€” πŸ‚

  • It's been a bit f a quiet week this week β€” well, at home anyway. Work has been full on, and maybe that has contributed to the quietness of the week.
  • Contrary to what I mentioned last week, the weather has started to turn here in Canberr...

Week 7 β€” Same same, but different

  • I finished the Lightfall campaign this week on legendary! It was pretty amazing knocking over the last encounter solo. It took me a bit of bumping up against the whack physics in Destiny, but got there in the end :) The missions and setting...

Week 6 β€” Sleepless in CBR

  • This week, the temperature has cooled way down in Canberra. I've had to double up on long sleeve shirts some days to stay warm, and some of the leaves on our trees are starting to turn πŸ‚
  • I've been playing through the new "Ligh...

Week 5 β€” Plant's alive!

Week 4 β€” Meet the team.

  • I am coming to the end of my week in Melbourne. It's been a great little week. Taking the train to work continues to be a novelty as does getting home past 7pm. I don't know how I managed to do that in the pre-work-from-home days, a...

Week 3 β€” Ruby Ruby Ruby.

  • I've been listening to the latest The Adventure Zone campaign, Steeplechase . Based on the Blades in the Dark tabletop RPG, it seems to be a much faster paced campaign as compared to some of the other DnD based campaigns. So far I am qu...

Week 2 β€” Next week, and next week.

  • Nintendo dropped a surprise release of Metroid Prime Remastered on us this week! I remember reading, and re-reading all of the promotional material of the original when it was announced out in ~2001. Then being amazed by the detail in Samu...

Week 1 β€” This time, for sure.

  • πŸ“² New blog, who this? I have been re-building this site with Hanami & Tailwind, following the W3C's Micropub spec (mainly so I can leverage plethora of amazing compatible clients out there to write posts like this).
  • Since the enshit...

Ruby learning materials.

I often get asked about recommendations for resources to learn Ruby (and how to program, generally). This list is intended to catalogue the various resources I have shared over the years and be an easy reference point for future learners.

...

Deploying a Hanami 2.0 app to fly.io.

I have a couple of small hobby apps that were on Heroku's free tier (RIP) that I have now moved over to Fly.io. Fly.io has a migrate from Heroku process for Rails apps, but as far as I could see, not for any Ruby app. So I had to do thin...

Managing dotfiles.

It's not often that I get a new computer, but on the odd occasion that I do, I like to have all of my config prepared and ready to copy over!

To achieve this, I am using chezmoi and GitHub to keep an up to date snapshot of my dotfiles. ...

Naming things is ~hard~ fun

Like most people*, I like to name the various devices in the house after a theme. For the longest time, my devices were unnamed, until I moved to Apple's ecosystem and picked up my first external SSD for time machine.

My chosen theme was the...

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