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.
2018-05-04
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.
2017-12-08
I've finally made a foray into Python packaging;
publishing my own static site
generator. What follows are my notes on the process and some implications on
the development of what used to static.
2017-11-09
Lately I've been faced with some of the peculiarities of UI testing, in my case, using Selenium. Not only are the tests slower than other kinds of tests, they are often tied to specific enviornments. In an effort to combat this coupling of "special" environments I've been working on reliably creating new environments.
2017-09-25
I put off cleaning up cruft on my server for too long and then put off writing anything about it while I waited to see what fell off in the wash. It turns out, things were pretty painless.
2017-08-11
Projects like gofmt and rustfmt aim to simplify or even eliminate discussions of style during code review. Several tools purport to do the same for Python, but how well do they work, and how can you tell?