Blog Archive

Reflections on code, the things I read and what I've been up to.

comp. sci 3 min read

The Hitchhiking Anti-pattern

You have an application. It works with complex data of varying structure. There are many optional parts to each piece of data. The domain lends itself to processing services working...

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web 1 min read

Vertical Blanking in the Browser World

There’s a really straight-forward approach to updating the UI in a JavaScript browser app. Use chunk of hidden HTML, duplicate this and then manually update the duplicated elements to show...

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xmpp 2 min read

Lessons and Tips for Using XMPP

A sports broadcasting project I worked on a year ago used XMPP as a performance optimisation and for in-game chat. We used ejabberd (on AWS EC2) for the server, Strophe.js...

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work 1 min read

Clojure's Thread for Monads

Over the last few months, I’ve really been enjoying writing Clojure. In an effort to learn the language better, I’ve kept leaning on my code to make it clearer and...

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work 7 min read

Scala — 1★ Would Not Program Again

With Scala you feel smart having just got something to work in a beautiful way but when you look around the room to tell your clojure colleague how clever you...

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society 2 min read

The Value of Privacy

Martin Fowler has recently published an article, “Privacy Protects Bothersome People”, about privacy’s value in providing protection for people who are agitating for change. It’s a great counter to the...

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