Tinkerer

On Inclusive Language In Tech

Twitter recently announced that they're beginning to change many of the terms they use, to "more inclusive" variants. Is it all just virtue signalling, or are the new words better?

Death Spirals and Working Too Damn Hard

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what I call Death Spirals. The name might be a bit much but I like the dramatic flair.

5 Reasons To Not Use Observables in C#

When I was first introduced to Observables in C#, they sounded pretty damn good. “They just model streams of data”, “It’s just data over time” and “It’s just the push equivalent of an IEnumerable”. After working with them for a little while, I don’t think they’re as good as I was told.

Implementing A Fast Queryable Storage with Apache Avro and Azure Block Blobs

At my employer SCADA MINDS we’re currently working on implementing a data pipeline for one of the larger wind companies in the world. Wind turbines have a lot of sensors, that generate a lot of time-series data. For the amount of turbines we need to support, we need to be able to process upwards of 1GB/sec.

A Checklist For Evaluating New Technology

New technology often comes along with a lot of promises. All the hard things? They’re easy now. All of your troubles? Shh, they’re all better now.

Static Factory Methods vs Constructors In C#

Recently while pair programming with a colleague, we got into discussing the best way to initialize new objects in C#. I’ve always just implemented constructors and left it at that, while he tended to favour static factory methods. This led to a lot of discussion and back-and-forth about the pros and cons of each type.

Our Decision Whether or Not To Use Serverless

Internally at SCADA MINDS, we’ve had to make a decision whether or not to use a Serverless architecture for a large project. I wrote a post earlier on the general pros and cons of Serverless, but like most projects, there are some unique circumstances that we need to consider.

To Serverless or Not To Serverless

Internally at SCADA MINDS, we’ve had a lot of discussion whether or not to use serverless, Azure functions to be more specific, for a large project. This is my attempt to give a balanced overview of the pros and cons of Serverless, to help us make the right decision.

How Azure Application Insights cost our company 4k USD in a couple of weeks

Or the alternative title, "How Microsoft shot me in one foot, and then gave me a gun so I could shoot my other one"

Prettier for C# - Developing an auto-formatting pre-commit hook

Many programming languages have automatic formatters. Go has gofmt, Rust has rustfmt, JavaScript has prettier and python has black. Being able to, in an editor-independent way, have your code automatically formatted without having to worry about it, is extremely freeing. It means there's a whole slew of religious wars you don't have to fight, and it means you never have to review a pull request with a bunch of noise, because this particular editor or user thinks the braces belong on some other line than they were. Unfortunately C# doesn't really have an equivalent, but here's my attempt at making one.

How to deploy multiple ASP.Net Core Microservices from a monorepository

We've had issues coordinating across different ASP.NET microservices that lived in different repositories, so we moved them all into one big repository.

How to Dockerize an ASP.NET Core Application with Azure Pipelines

Building a docker image of an ASP.Net core application with Azure Pipelines can be surprisingly tricky - here's how you do it

The 3 technical mistakes we made while building our startup

Looking back at our failed startup Reccoon, we made a bunch of technical mistakes, that meant we weren't able to execute as succesfully as we'd like. Here are the three major ones.

We're shutting down Reccoon - here's what we learned along the way

The post-mortem of our startup Reccoon. The journey, and the mistakes we made along the way.

An In-Depth walkthrough of Djangos Default Middleware

This is a very in-depth walkthrough of what the different pieces of Djangos default MiddleWare does, and how it relates to django-rest-framework. Most of this isn’t particularly relevant to know unless you’re debugging a Middleware issue - in that case it’s invaluable information.

Optimizing Django REST Framework performance with django-auto-prefetching

Django-auto-prefetching is a library that automatically prefetches data from the database when using the django-rest-framework

Programming by voice in 2019

In this post we’ll look at what it means to program by voice in 2019 as well as what the future may bring.

Choosing between Babel and TypeScript

Projects using babel can now use TypeScript without having to include the typescript compiler. But should you? We look at the pros and cons of each.

How to Read Programming Error Messages

Much of modern development now is searching for the right things. Error messages can be tricky if you're new or working on a new stack. This is a short guide about the anatomy of an error message - what parts there are, which are important and which can be ignored.

4 Future Challenges for TypeScript

TypeScript is great, but it has issues. I outline the four challenges I think are most important to pay attention to, to ensure that TypeScript remains great.

React To Typescript Part 2: Converting React Components to TypeScript

This is the second in a series of blog post that will deal with converting an existing React codebase to Typescript. We’ll end end up with a completely typechecked codebase. This time we’ll be looking adding type annotations to simple React components.

In What Order Should I Start Adding Types?

When you add gradual types to an existing project, it can sometimes seem difficult to know where to start. Here I present how to do it bottom-up.

Converting a React Codebase to Typescript. Part 1: Getting it to compile

This is the first in a series of blog post that will deal with gradually converting an existing React codebase to Typescript and ending up with a completely typechecked codebase. This part deals with getting the first TypeScript file to compile along with the rest of the application.

State of Voice Coding 2017

We take a look at how Voice Coding looks in 2017, new advances in speech recognition engines and different systems.

Overcoming Repetitive Strain Injury(RSI): What worked and what didn't

About a year ago I started having pain in my left pinky. At the time I was a student, and had just helped start bambuu where I develop software. I figured the pain was temporary so I kept on working, thinking it’d go away by itself. This would be a very short blog post if I was right. After while it had spread to my right pinky as well.

4 Things I wish I had known before starting my first larger project

Recently we created a placemat game-controller and a game for a university project. The goal was to help users eat slower in an engaging way. These are the four things I wish I had known before starting.

Conserving willpower by deciding later

Here I present a short technique that helps making good decisions easier, e.g. buy healthy, excercise, etc.

Relative deprivation and the big picture.

I recently read Malcolm Gladwell’s book “David and Goliath – Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants.” Gladwell writes about a phenomenon called relative deprivation – when we are deprived of something, relative to the people around us. I’m going to talk a little about this phenomenon, and how it relates to keeping the big picture of the world in mind.