A collection of thoughts and experiments that at one point occupied my time, some still do. These are the things happening in my idle cycles.
2018-09-18
I had an interesting problem to work on this afternoon that lead a few features of Postgres I haven't previously used. It was an interesting exercise in some quick prototyping in pure SQL.
2018-07-04
Attempting to analyze and profile one of my projects I've come to appreciate an orthogonal solution to the need for speed.
2018-06-30
I have been using pytest for a few different projects recently and while I've found it very usable, I have also found it to be very complicated.
2018-06-29
Struggling needlessly with Django's Object Relational Mapper, I find myself agreeing more and more with Ted Neward who claimed ORMs to be the vietnam of computer science.
2018-05-04
I was browing this webserver's load average history and trying to correlate "spikes" with activity in logs. This eventually lead to browsing the logs for fail2ban, with some notable results.
2018-04-21
The other day I re-worked an SQL query used for generating a code review visualization. Today I spent some time rethinking the utility and complexity of such a silly little program.
2018-04-18
I've recently rekindled my interest in relational databases and SQL, spurred on by a number of issues with query performance. As a tractable example of poor performance in an existing system I returned to a problem I've written about before, visualizing code review metrics.
2018-02-10
I've been slowly making my way back into the world of C and C++ lately; consequently I'm filled with angst at what I perceive to be failings in the design of the languages. Just a rant.
2018-01-28
I recently experimented with system monitoring but stopped short of creating any reporting on the metrics gathered. I took some time to draw up a quick interface to surface some of that information in a further exploration of managing my own server.
2018-01-21
I have been experimenting with a somewhat radical sounding practice for developing software — one designed to reduce both complexity and bugs. It isn't agile, and it isn't TDD, the closest thing to it is copy-paste.