https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/blog.htmlRecent content in Blog on Daniel BowmanHugo -- gohugo.ioen© 2025 Daniel BowmanSun, 15 Mar 2026 15:00:22 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2026/03/15/is-the-government-removing-my-sons-right-to-an-education-thoughts-on-the-send-white-paper.htmlSun, 15 Mar 2026 15:00:22 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2026/03/15/is-the-government-removing-my-sons-right-to-an-education-thoughts-on-the-send-white-paper.htmlOn February 23rd the government published the SEND white paper - SEND Reform: Putting Children and Young People First. This is meant to be the start of a consultation on reform of the SEND system in the UK. It will have wide-reaching implications for anyone that has SEND. And on the current timeline my son is due to be in the first cohort moving to the new system I think there’s a real chance my son will be forced out of education.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2025/04/19/why-declarative-management-beats-command-and-control-in-engineering.htmlSat, 19 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2025/04/19/why-declarative-management-beats-command-and-control-in-engineering.htmlTL;DR: Declarative management empowers engineers by focusing on outcomes instead of tasks. By giving context instead of commands, you increase engagement, performance, and psychological safety–while making it easier to scale leadership and grow careers. Getting your team to perform at their best involves giving them enough bounded autonomy to be able to efficiently work towards their goals. Declarative language, a communication method formalised by Linda K. Murphy to support children with autism, can also significantly uplift team morale and output in engineering.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/10/29/the-invisible-leash-how-rigid-acceptance-criteria-stifle-developer-autonomy-and-produce-worse-results.htmlTue, 29 Oct 2024 20:41:47 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/10/29/the-invisible-leash-how-rigid-acceptance-criteria-stifle-developer-autonomy-and-produce-worse-results.htmlThere are many productivity dead ends contained within Agile implementations, and Acceptance Criteria (AC) are the worst. Acceptance criteria are specific conditions or requirements that a project or task must meet to be considered complete and satisfactory. They are meant to be standards agreed upon between developers and stakeholders on what done looks like. Comprehensive acceptance criteria will list both functional and non-functional requirements, including updating documentation. On the surface, that sounds pretty reasonable, but there are a whole bunch of shortcomings.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/28/two-weeks-with-a-split-ortho-linear-keyboard-my-experience-so-far.htmlSun, 28 Apr 2024 14:45:36 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/28/two-weeks-with-a-split-ortho-linear-keyboard-my-experience-so-far.htmlI’m two weeks into using a split ortho-linear keyboard, specifically the ZSA Voyager. The move to a keyboard like this seems like an obvious decision; the horizontally staggered keys of a standard keyboard force your hands into some unnatural moves. I think it is one of the reasons I’ve never properly learned to touch type. After 2 weeks with the new keyboard, I’ve made a lot more progress than I ever had before.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/21/architectural-decision-records-a-potent-tool-for-consensus-and-progress.htmlSun, 21 Apr 2024 11:35:16 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/21/architectural-decision-records-a-potent-tool-for-consensus-and-progress.htmlOne thing I take with me from role to role is Architectural Decision Records. They are a potent tool in gaining consensus on engineering decisions and unblocking the way forward. ADRs in brief An ADR is a document that records why a decision needs to be made, the context in which the decision is being made, the actual decision and any consequences. Typically, they’ll be broken down into sections along those lines.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/14/childrens-menus-in-the-uk-why-do-they-always-disappoint.htmlSun, 14 Apr 2024 20:26:21 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/14/childrens-menus-in-the-uk-why-do-they-always-disappoint.htmlWhy is it that every restaurant in the UK does children’s food badly? It’s pretty much a universal truth that anywhere that lists a children’s menu, whatever the culinary level of the restaurant, the food will be boring and also cooked badly. Last week I took Little Man for his first Nando’s. My natural inclination was just to get him an adult dish, which is what we normally do. He would rather have something interesting than fish fingers, bad pizza and pasta with tomato sauce.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/08/customizing-your-tools-applying-craftsmanship-principles-to-your-digital-life.htmlMon, 08 Apr 2024 15:24:34 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/08/customizing-your-tools-applying-craftsmanship-principles-to-your-digital-life.htmlAny good craftsman spends time making their tools work for themselves. This might be to make them better suited to a specific task or to fit the user better. If you’re using a tool every day, then it makes sense to customise the handle so it becomes an extension of you instead of just the handle designed for the average person. With computers, the same principle applies. If you’re using something daily, make it work better for you.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/01/understanding-the-multifaceted-role-of-an-engineering-manager.htmlMon, 01 Apr 2024 19:59:44 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/04/01/understanding-the-multifaceted-role-of-an-engineering-manager.htmlSome roles in technology are common to nearly all organisations of a certain size, but in each company, they can mean something completely different. If you’re a software developer, what’s expected of you will be essentially the same everywhere. However, once you make the leap to engineering manager, you suddenly get a lot of variety. I believe a lot of companies get the engineering manager role completely wrong. It’s easy to misread the job title as being a manager of engineers.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/31/embracing-the-role-of-ai-as-an-editor-and-marketer.htmlSun, 31 Mar 2024 11:20:05 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/31/embracing-the-role-of-ai-as-an-editor-and-marketer.htmlI feel like I’m a bit late to the AI game. Part of the reason is that we’re not yet allowed to use it at work, although hopefully that’s changing soon. It has started creeping into my personal life in subtle ways: Rewrite recipes using simple steps. I already use Paprika to extract and store recipes. It does a great job of getting only the instructions and removing the life story.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/24/breaking-the-silence-normalizing-speaking-up-in-organizations.htmlSun, 24 Mar 2024 17:19:00 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/24/breaking-the-silence-normalizing-speaking-up-in-organizations.htmlOrganisations are generally riddled with social rules that evolve over time. As much as HR would want to show the company’s culture through fun events and having a beer fridge, it’s these unspoken social rules that end up defining the culture. These social rules take several forms but they are often represented with hierarchies that exist beyond the org chart. For example, even though technology and sales may look equal on an org chart, there is often an unwritten rule not to question anything sales because nobody in tech wants to be able to be blamed for a sale not happening.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/17/why-is-tesco-so-hostile-to-shoppers.htmlSun, 17 Mar 2024 16:37:13 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/17/why-is-tesco-so-hostile-to-shoppers.htmlOnline grocery shopping in the UK is a weirdly hostile experience, especially if you shop with Tesco. The entire experience is built in an entirely opposite way to how a customer-centric site should be. The biggest pain points are: You must search for items one by one. If you have a shopping list of multiple items, technically, there is a way to paste the list into the search, but it’s useless and faster to do things one by one.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/10/git-should-not-be-a-mystery.htmlSun, 10 Mar 2024 19:56:06 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/03/10/git-should-not-be-a-mystery.htmlThe number of senior developers who claim not to understand Git is worrying. If I had one recommendation for a junior developer, it would be to ensure they knew how to add, commit, rebase, fixup and squash from the command line. The git log is your portfolio on any project, and you should have the skills to make it look professional. One of the first things I do when I get an offer for an internal developer transfer is to look at their commit history across the organisation.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/02/26/software-development-needs-apprenticeships.htmlMon, 26 Feb 2024 20:02:32 +0800https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2024/02/26/software-development-needs-apprenticeships.htmlGreat software engineers are craftsmen, not scientists. There is often a perception that it is an academic pursuit and that the best candidates will have good Computer Science degrees from renowned universities. It’s bizarre how this misconception persists, as anyone who has spent any time working with people in the software development and DevOps space will have observed these facts: There are a lot of very mediocre colleagues with Computer Science degrees.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/12/03/dangers-monoglot-platform.htmlSun, 03 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/12/03/dangers-monoglot-platform.htmlMany CTOs dream of the perfect platform where all the software is written in the same language, uses the same tooling and is deployed on a single consistent platform. There are some clear advantages to this: hiring is simplified because you can hire for a particular set of skills, it’s easy to define security requirements and audit for compliance, and defining the technology roadmap becomes simpler. If you only use Java, you only need to be interested in what’s coming in its future and can disregard the rest of the tech universe.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/11/21/effective-stand-up.htmlTue, 21 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/11/21/effective-stand-up.htmlYou either love or hate the morning stand-up, and if you hate it you’re probably doing it wrong. In the various companies I’ve worked with I’ve seen a number of patterns and anti patterns that are the difference between a team being effective vs not making any progress at all. Person based is better than task based This is probably the biggest differentiator that I’ve seen. The traditional approach for stand-up is to go round each team member and essentially answer three questions:https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/06/25/brio-brand-decay.htmlSun, 25 Jun 2023 12:15:26 +0100https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/06/25/brio-brand-decay.htmlMy son loves his wooden railway set. He can play for it for hours at a time and often ropes me into it. Over time he’s come up with ideas for new layouts to execute, which means paying £££ for expansion packs from Brio or going the slightly cheaper route and getting Brio compatible set. Loads of people do Brio compatible tracks – Ikea and John Lewis are the ones I personally see most, but also things like Trackmaster can be integrated with Brio sets.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/30/ren-rabbit-hole.htmlThu, 30 Mar 2023 08:46:35 +0100https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/30/ren-rabbit-hole.htmlI’ve fallen down the Ren rabbit hole. The range of musical and poetic skills on display are just ridiculous and I don’t know anything else like him at the moment. Top recommend is the Tale of Jenny and Screech, a three part story with such vivid imagery that it still triggers a strong emotional response on every listen.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/26/session-musician-mindset.htmlSun, 26 Mar 2023 16:29:47 +0100https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/26/session-musician-mindset.htmlMike Crittenden recently published a blog post, Bandmates vs. session musicians that really resonated, not only because I definitely fall into the session musician camp as a technologist, but I also did as a musician. My consultancy super power is being able to turn up in any scenario and be able to understand the domain faster than most people. I also leave my ego very much at the door. I turn up, try to understand what the client is after, and then selectively pull things out of my toolbag that will get the job done in the best way.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/24/what-to-do-to-make-it-through-today.htmlFri, 24 Mar 2023 07:17:41 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/24/what-to-do-to-make-it-through-today.htmlI have one simple strategy for planning my work for the day; it’s to answer this question: What do I need to do today to be able to walk away with a sense of completeness? That doesn’t mean completing all tasks, but it does mean that every task should get to a point where I feel that I’ve done enough and it can be picked up the following week. The key to this is maintaining a strong sense of deadlines and ensuring planned work does not exceed time available – something that is achievable but I only realised post-30 years old.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/23/more-home-automation.htmlThu, 23 Mar 2023 15:27:07 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/23/more-home-automation.htmlI spent a bit of time off today refining some home automation. With the node red setup I have adding any additional automations is super easy and means I can get quality of life improvements for little effort. The simpler piece I did today was digging out a smart switch and adding it to my son’s night light. That’s now on a timer and controllable from home assistant as well, which will resolve some mucking around we’ve been doing at night to make him happy with light levels.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/21/major-projects-poor-documentation.htmlTue, 21 Mar 2023 08:46:46 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/21/major-projects-poor-documentation.htmlIn the past few weeks I’ve found myself increasingly struggling with poor documentation from pretty significant tools that a lot of modern technology is built on. Firstly Spring Boot. This is problematic on 2 fronts. Firstly some of the documentation is ambiguous; we’ve repeatedly had to confirm behaviours with integration tests rather than rely on docs. The second problem here is the official documentation is very rarely returned in Google. More often there’ll be stack overflow posts that comment on the behaviour with no reference to where they got that information.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/20/hey-duggee-smut.htmlMon, 20 Mar 2023 08:46:58 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/20/hey-duggee-smut.htmlHey Duggee has always been known for having plenty of references in it for the adults but I think I may have found the most explicitly smutty one so far in Season 4: The Library Badge: NORI: Hello old dears. ROLY: What you doing? OLD DEAR 1: Nothing exciting. OLD DEAR 2: It's all a bit dry at the moment. ROLY: Then read this! OLD DEAR 1: Don't Spare the Sauce with Chef Buck Stag.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/18/make-your-schemas-more-like-contracts.htmlSat, 18 Mar 2023 07:52:50 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/18/make-your-schemas-more-like-contracts.htmlIf you lookup best practices on schemas they will inevitably start talking about evolvable schemas. Don’t get me wrong – evolvable schemas are great, but they instantly pull the schema away from being something that looks like a contract to something that causes confusion. If all fields can be modified then it’s not a contract! A system I’ve been working on recently has enforced evolvable schemas for a number of years.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/17/are-slow-pipelines-worse-then-no-pipeline.htmlFri, 17 Mar 2023 08:01:49 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/17/are-slow-pipelines-worse-then-no-pipeline.htmlI’ve been working as a guest on another codebase recently and it has been very painful for one reason only. The code itself is absolutely fine but a run of the pipeline for a feature branch takes in excess of an 45 minutes and master takes an hour – way too long to be productive. My specific task this week has been to work on deployment, for which I generally needed to run the whole pipeline to evaluate some very small changes.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/16/avro-vs-protobuf.htmlThu, 16 Mar 2023 07:59:24 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/16/avro-vs-protobuf.htmlOn my latest project the are fully onboard with Avro for shipping data between microservices. I’ve come from a typically Protobuf background and the shift to Avro is somewhat painful and I’m not sure I would recommend it over Protobuf. Here’s my high level thoughts: Writing schemas in JSON is daft Protobuf schemas are lightweight, obviously composable and by convention encourage good documentation within the schema. By contrast, the schema for Avro is in JSON, meaning no comments, and sure you can keep things DRY but it’s not particularly obvious and prone to breakage.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/15/migrated-to-hugo.htmlWed, 15 Mar 2023 15:06:08 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/15/migrated-to-hugo.htmlI’ve been wanting to move away from Jekyll for a while. It was frustrating that to even do a simple preview of posts that I realistically had to run it in docker to ensure ruby versions and gem versions all aligned. Sure it’s easy enough, and it’s kinda my day job, but that’s the point. I don’t want the thing I quickly throw blog posts onto to become as complicated as something I need to run for work.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/14/single-screen-setup.htmlTue, 14 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/14/single-screen-setup.htmlWhilst many of my colleagues opt for running 2, 3 or even 4 screens while they work I have spent the last 5 years on a single screen setup. In my opinion having only one screen has made me more productive than 2 or 3. You can only focus on one thing at a time I’m a big doubter of multi-tasking. Anything that looks like multi-tasking is really rapid context switching.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/13/where-ai-can-give-me-value.htmlMon, 13 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/13/where-ai-can-give-me-value.htmlWith all the fuss that ChatGPT can generate large amounts of code that use case is generally not that interesting to me. If ChatGPT is trying to solve it then is it a novel challenge that you should even be writing code for in the first place, or using libraries that tackle it better. Where ChatGPT could have helped was a task I tackled last week. I’d coded up a large data mapping exercise of a couple of hundred fields.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/12/goobye-to-logseq.htmlSun, 12 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/12/goobye-to-logseq.htmlIn 2022 I went through a run of trying different note taking tools and broadly settled on Logseq. It’s a journal based logging tool with storage in markdown – something that made me feel better about trying it than other proprietary storage based tools. However, I learned a big lesson here. Logseq may use markdown but the way it structures documents and organises things it may as well be storing in a proprietary format.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/10/best-note-taking-app.htmlFri, 10 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/10/best-note-taking-app.htmlThe best note taking app is the one that reduces friction on inserting notes. At least, that’s the conclusion I’ve come to after trying many different approaches. Now I’ve largely gone in on Apple ecosystem it means for me, right now, the best app is Apple notes. Here’s why: It’s integrated with Apple search tools and there’s Alfred workflows for it. It syncs seamlessly between Apple devices. The effort to input is minimal - there’s aren’t too many options to get started.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/09/art-of-debugging.htmlThu, 09 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/09/art-of-debugging.htmlDebugging is something that I consider to be a particular skill of mine. Give me something that isn’t working correctly or needs to be rethought for performance and I’ll generally be able to get to a better solution. An incident today made me slightly more aware of what the process is. On moving some furniture I managed to completely knock out the internet in our living room. With a deadline of a couple of hours before my son got back from nursery and would want to watch TV I had to get it back working.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/08/dont-move-improve-longlists.htmlWed, 08 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/08/dont-move-improve-longlists.htmlWe spent a year living out of our house while it was renovated and turned into our dream house. While that was enough reward in itself we’ve also made it to the longlist for Don’t Move, Improve! 2023 as Breathable House.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/07/on-being-tribeless.htmlTue, 07 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/07/on-being-tribeless.htmlAt the weekend, when I was on the Underground people watching, I came to the realisation that I’ve never really been properly part of a tribe, except perhaps as a teenager. By tribe I mean a group of people with similar interests and a shared culture/language. As a teenager I guess I was part of the heavy metal tribe – dressed in black, listening to Metallica. It wasn’t a large tribe, nor a particularly close tribe.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/06/life-stack-update.htmlMon, 06 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/06/life-stack-update.htmlHere’s a quick update to my life stack. Most of the shift comes from a switch to the Apple ecosystem – it’s such a cliche but for me it’s just easier to work with as I’m older and have less time. I’ve also changed up my productivity approach. Computing Still using the 2021 Macbook Air but now I’ve got an iPhone 13 to go with it. Productivity I’ve ditched Taskwarrior. I really loved its prioritising of tasks and being able to set dependencies, but the workaround I was doing for syncing it made it fundamentally less useful.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/05/science-museum-review.htmlSun, 05 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/05/science-museum-review.htmlOur second museum trip in 8 days and this is a big contrast from the last one. Firstly, it was a much shorter trip, but also a much cheaper one. Little man is still too young to do most of the paid for things at the Science Museum. We stuck pretty much to the main galleries. There wasn’t that much to keep a toddler engaged – once we’d seen Puffing Billy he was just about done and ready for the shop and food.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/04/things-i-wont-subscribe-to.htmlSat, 04 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/04/things-i-wont-subscribe-to.htmlA story in The Times today about Roald Dahl ebooks being replaced with the new censored versions in has reminded my that there are some things I won’t subscribe to any more. This hasn’t always been the case, I used to be a massive proponent of moving physical assets to digital forms. I don’t own any CDs or any means to play them. I’ve never had a big DVD collection. I probably have more ebooks than physical books.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/03/subscription-regret.htmlFri, 03 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/03/subscription-regret.htmlI’m constantly finding myself with subscription regret. So many apps have moved to a subscription model and offer reasonable discounts for committing to a year or longer. Inevitably, within about 10% of the subscription duration I find a different service that I maybe would have preferred, but with the long lock in I feel like I can’t try it, or I regret spending money because a free alternative would have done the trick.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/02/keep-apps-native.htmlThu, 02 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/02/keep-apps-native.htmlThere seems to be a continual march towards everything being a webapp but I’m not on board. As far as possible I try to use native apps to whichever platform I’m on and here’s why. Quality is generally higher This isn’t really directly an issue on being native or not; there are some great quality web apps, like Fastmail. However, they are very much the exception that proves the rule. For most people offering just a webapp experience then it often means they’re doing it that way to save money.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/01/mac-shortcuts.htmlWed, 01 Mar 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/03/01/mac-shortcuts.htmlI’m very much into automating things as much as possible. That stretches through to how I use my computers and at work and home I try to add shortcuts to automate flows. Here are some of my key ones. Home Morning catchup Every morning I grab my breakfast and go through the same list of apps and websites to prepare for the day. I’ve simply got a shortcut that opens in order:https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/02/28/horniman-museum.htmlTue, 28 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/02/28/horniman-museum.htmlWe went out for a father-son trip to the Horniman Museum last weekend. The primary aim was to go to see the Brick Dinos exhibition, which promised 20 models of dinosaurs and some time spent playing with Lego. We ended up fitting in all of the museum and in general I don’t think it was value for money. You can definitely go and have a free day out and only see the standard exhibits, but in theory the exciting things are what they charge you for.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/02/26/make-people-look-good.htmlSun, 26 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2023/02/26/make-people-look-good.htmlA common theme in my career is that any progress I’ve ever made is simply from making other people look good. At its simplest this is getting promotions through getting my boss promoted - as a permanent employee there’s a really nice linear path to this. In consulting it looks a little bit different. The aim isn’t to directly get promoted, it’s extension of contracts and expansion of responsibilities. There’s also less direct potential for getting your boss promoted, nor is that necessarily a good thing for securing future work, particularly in large enterprises.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/12/02/what-ive-learned-as-a-java-engineer.htmlFri, 02 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/12/02/what-ive-learned-as-a-java-engineer.htmlI’ve recently been working on a project where, as part of my delivery responsibilities, I’ve also been getting hands on with writing some Java code. I’ve been luck to be teamed up with some great Java experts and managed to keep myself out of the critical path, but have managed to get deep enough to be writing API endpoints with database peristence and cucumber tests. Here are my quick thoughts on the experience.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/11/23/out-of-the-crisis.htmlWed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/11/23/out-of-the-crisis.htmlIt doesn’t matter if you’re in manufacturing, running a restaurant or developing software, one of the biggest boosts to any business is in reducing rework. The output is better quality, employees are happier and removing rework cycles increases throughput. In software delivery this is conceptually a solved problem - have cross functional teams building software following the principles of CD and the barrier to entry is low. Yet this is still not the default for many organisations, both enterprise and startup.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/11/23/out-of-the-crisis.htmlWed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/11/23/out-of-the-crisis.htmlIt doesn’t matter if you’re in manufacturing, running a restaurant or developing software, one of the biggest boosts to any business is in reducing rework. The output is better quality, employees are happier and removing rework cycles increases throughput. In software delivery this is conceptually a solved problem - have cross functional teams building software following the principles of CD and the barrier to entry is low. Yet this is still not the default for many organisations, both enterprise and startup.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/02/07/mastering-lambdas-with-poetry.htmlMon, 07 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2022/02/07/mastering-lambdas-with-poetry.htmlAny project that relies heavily on lambda functions inevitably ends up with a monorepo containing hundreds of lambda functions. Each of these functions are really an application in their own right with their own tests, dependencies and code owners and potentially using a range of different runtime versions. The AWS tutorial approach to building and deploying lambdas does not work in a clean deployment setting. The hard requirements I have for a system are:https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2020/08/01/home-stack.htmlSat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2020/08/01/home-stack.htmlOver the past couple of months, in preparation for some home renovation I’ve made some changes to my home automation setup. Zigbee for everything Everything is moving to zigbee. Currently that means hue light bulbs, motion sensors, humidity sensors and door sensors. After renovation it will also be zigbee modules in the light switches. Most significantly I’ll ditch the Nest thermostat and migrate to zigbee based. Node red Home assistant is good for home automation, but node red really takes it up to another level.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2020/02/20/platform-as-a-product.htmlThu, 20 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2020/02/20/platform-as-a-product.htmlAn increasing number of businesses are creating platform teams to build a solid foundation on which their developers can work. For this to be successful it’s necessary to treat the platform as a product. Here I explore what that means. What is a platform? A platform can broadly be described as “APIs, environments, services and practices that allow developers to focus on delivering value.” Really it’s a collection of any tools, templates and processes that allows a developer to get on with developing and not have to worry about Ops.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/08/24/chrome-privacy.htmlSat, 24 Aug 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/08/24/chrome-privacy.htmlIn the latest Google Chrome blogpost Google outline a new project called Privacy Sandbox. They say this is intended to protect user’s privacy, but in reality it is privacy harming and a betrayal of the role of what a web browser should be. Let me disect the main point they make. Privacy 1. Blocking cookies encourages bad behaviour First, large scale blocking of cookies undermine people’s privacy by encouraging opaque techniques such as fingerprinting.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/07/15/the-myth-of-ai.htmlMon, 15 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/07/15/the-myth-of-ai.htmlThere are lots of cargo cults in technology. Blockchain is the most obvious current one, with only 2 uses; 1. Gambling on cryptocurrency and 2. Using it as a term to attract investment before pivoting to another more suitable technology. Machine learning seems like it shouldn’t fall into this trap but for a number of reasons it’s currently high on my list of cargo cult tech. 1. It’s expensive To do machine learning you need an accurately tagged training data set.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/05/07/google-io.htmlTue, 07 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/05/07/google-io.htmlEvery year Google IO gets less interesting and sees Google heading in a direction that ultimately threatens their long term future. The core of every part of the presentation outside of pure search, was assistant. It drove the Android section and the devices section. Assistant was a great step forward for Google, and is at least as good as Amazon’s Echo as a voice assistant. There are 2 fundamental problems with it that are starting to become non-negotiable with me though.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/05/06/space-race.htmlMon, 06 May 2019 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2019/05/06/space-race.htmlOn May 1st and 2nd I took a team from Black Square Media to the Waltham Forest “The Great Space Race” hackathon. This was hosted in the new AWS building in Shoreditch. The aim of the hackathon was to create a platform that would make it easier for people to book council owned spaces in Waltham Forest. We built our solution using our standard stack of Grape API plus VueJS/Vuetify frontend.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/12/09/this-week.htmlSun, 09 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/12/09/this-week.html🎼 Music My Dragonfly black arrived on Monday and I’ve been on a serious listening kick since. The thing most upsetting me is the missing quality on some of my old CD rips is really apparent. Theres definitely a chance that I’m going to need to rebuy a few classic albums. 📚 Books Back on the Sharpe train this week and it’s one of the earlier novels. Reviews say this one is a bit jarring if you read the stories on order because Cornwell’s writing style changed so much over the years.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/12/02/this-week.htmlSun, 02 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/12/02/this-week.html💻 Computing Github released subscribing to releases only. Such a powerful feature and amazed it’s only just now been implemented. There are lots of open source projects I use ans want notifications that I can nupgrade without being bombarded with all of the other issues. In the good old days this would have been through a release mailing list, but I don’t see many projects running mailing lists these days.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/25/this-week.htmlSun, 25 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/25/this-week.html💻 Computing I’ve done a fair amount of trying to get the DSub project into slightly better shape. It’s an old android client for subsonic and it’s got a bit left behind as android best practices have been updated. There are some nasty bugs in it that are surely fixable, but ideally need a lot of depenedencies to be updated first. 📚 Books I finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers this week. Much better than Tipping Point and some interesting ideas that can be applied going forwards.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/04/this-week.htmlSun, 04 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/04/this-week.html💻 Computing Last week was a lot of fighting with Jenkins. It’s not a great CI platform. My feeling is at some point it tried to do too much and now everything is a workaround against architectural decisions. All I want from a CI system is to give me a clean environment that I can execute builds in, potentially with some caching. Jenkins can do that but I’m never quite sure if the environment I’m on is carrying forward any artifacts from previous builds.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/04/this-week.htmlSun, 04 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/11/04/this-week.html💻 Computing More CI fighting this week. Getting Cypress tests to behave predictably in CI has been more configuration tweaking than I would have liked. I still get the sense that these will be fragile going forwards. 📚 Books 2 books finished this week - “Never Let Me Go” - Kazuo Ishiguro and “Sputnick Sweetheart” - Haruki Murakami. I’ve definitely enjoyes Murakami a lot more, possibly one of the best opening chapters I’ve ever read.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/28/this-week.htmlSun, 28 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/28/this-week.html💻 Computing I’ve been getting some code commits done for DSub - an opensource android music player for Airsonic/Subsonic. I’ve not touched android development for a few years and it’s interesting how little has changed. Android Studio is a great bit of software, although some of its default keyboard shortcuts don’t do what you would expect. The project needs a bit of modernising. It’ll be interesting to see if there’s scope to use Kotlin, as Java null checking is boring.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/14/this-week.htmlSun, 14 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/14/this-week.html💻 Computing It’s amazing how different the process of contributing to different open source projects can be. One the one hand there’s something like homeassistant.io, where you have to sign a CLA and there’s generally going to be a fair amount of back and forth on even simple changes. On the other there is helm, where my (admittedly tiny) PR was reviewed, corrections suggested by automated systems, and then accepted without any conversation all within a couple of hours - a really frictionless contributing experience.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/07/this-week.htmlSun, 07 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/10/07/this-week.html🏡 House Electrics all done and paint test pots bought. It turns out we didn’t like any of the colours we bought testers of. After getting home with them an dbeing disappointed I remebered that Dulux have an augmented reality app - Dulux Visualiser. I wish we had looked at this earlier as it’s really got us thinking in a different direction with colours. 💻 Computing I’ve now taken to disabling custom fonts in my web browsers.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/30/this-week.htmlSun, 30 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/30/this-week.html🏡 House The electrician is coming in this week so it’s another week of moving furniture around the house. I’m hoping by the end of this we’ll have thrown a load of things away to make this process easier. With electrics about to be complete it’s onto seriously thinking about decoration. 📚 Books I finshed off ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’ and rewarded myself with a quick Sharpe story again. I’m now getting well into the original timeline of stories and it’s great having a bit more variety, but also amazing how many callbacks there are to stories that hadn’t been written yet.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/23/this-week.htmlSun, 23 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/23/this-week.html🏡 House No house work this week. Instead I’ve actually managed to find a local electrician that can move us forward. The plan is electrics, decoration then flooring. After that we’ll be complete for now. I got my bike setup for winter - new tyres that actually have a bit of tread and mud guards back on. Ironically it was too wet to actually try them out on Saturday after I fitted them so let’s hope the hold up for work.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/16/this-week.htmlSun, 16 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/16/this-week.html🏡 House I’ve finished lifting all the carpets. There’s still a bit of laminate that we are replacing that I need to remove, but that’s all the old flooring out. Next step is get the electrician in - the only services that we’re changing up. After that it’s just decoration. 📚 Books I didn’t get a chance to read much this week. I was out a lot of the time with birthday meals and client entertainment.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/09/this-week.htmlSun, 09 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/09/this-week.html🏡 House More carpet lifting this week, this time in the master bedroom. I found where the moth’s have been hanging out. Shifting this carpet should mostly resolve the moth problem. Now it’s on to finding an electrician and cracking on with deocorating. 📚 Books Collusion: How Russia helped Trump Win the White House is a fantastic primer on the current Trump investigations. It really makes it clear how obvious the collusion is.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/02/this-week.htmlSun, 02 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/09/02/this-week.html🏡 House It’s time to pull up all the carpets. I started this weekend with the easiest room with the least coconsequence, and by the end of the month there should be no more carpet in the house. Hopefully this resolves a bit of a moth problem that we have and makes it easier to just get on with other renovation/decoration, whether it’s us doing it or getting somebody else in to do it.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/27/this-week.htmlMon, 27 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/27/this-week.html📚 Books Factfulness - Hans Rosling - This is a must read book. The amount we get wrong about the world intuitively is pretty shocking. It’s hard to read newspapers, particularly the opinion pieces, and not instantly spot where their worldview is wrong. Algorithms To Live By - Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths - I’m still working through the last few pages of this book. As somebody that works with computers a lot of the algorithms themselves are well known to me, but the idea of applying a LRU cache to my t-shirt draw is new, and something worth trying.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/19/this-week.htmlSun, 19 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/19/this-week.html💻 Work I’ve spent most of this week dealing with Terraform, to the extent that I feel like I’ve picked up a really good grounding on it, as well as understanding some of it’s limitations. The biggest issue I’ve had with it is failure to tear down infrastructure due to dependency chains. These are things I was able to resolve manually but TF is definitely not completely hands free. 🎼 Music I’ve been wanting to see the Sleaford Mods for a couple of years but have missed their gigs.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/12/this-week.htmlSun, 12 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/12/this-week.html🎼 Music My listening at the moment is still almost entirely a combination of Punch Brothers and Sons of Kemet. There’s something in the 2 drums, tuba and sax combination that gets to me - the layering of different rythms between the 2 drummers is probably a large part of it, but there’s also something strangely hypnotic about the tuba. 📚 Books I’m starting to work through some of the physical books on our bookshelf.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/05/this-week.htmlSun, 05 Aug 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/08/05/this-week.htmlThis week has been another scorcher. I’ve been trying to find builders to do some small renovation on our house with no luck. I guess they’re mostly on holiday, and the ones that aren’t are just busy. 🎼 Music This week I’ve had Punch Brothers - All Ashore on pretty much constant loop. My favourite track at the moment is The Angel of Doubt - it’s an amazing blend of bluegrass, hip hop and baroque string lines.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/29/this-week.htmlSun, 29 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/29/this-week.htmlI missed posting last week as we were away in Toulouse for a friends wedding. The wedding was amazing but the trip mostly convinced me to never fly Ryanair again. The scheduled 16:15 flight didn’t actually take off until 23:45. This meant that when we arrived in Toulouse we arrived to closed car hire desks and fully booked hotels. Luckily we managed to get into an Ibis budget but we lost the car hire.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/15/this-week.htmlSun, 15 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/15/this-week.htmlThe Tour de France is on and unusually exciting. I’ve not paid for Eurosport this year - the number of ad breaks and the quality of the commentating isn’t enough to justify the fee. Last year I was on a new subscriber deal that was about what a regular single sport subscription should probably cost. I’ve been watching this year on ITV. I’ve always avoided ITV’s streaming services and this just reminds me why - no casting of the live stream, Flash is used in the browser (at least on Linux) and there seems to be a long delay between live streams finishing and the show being available on catch-up.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/08/this-week.htmlSun, 08 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/08/this-week.htmlI’m cancelling Netflix. In the past 4 weeks I’ve not watched it at all. There are a couple of good series on it, but considering I get Amazon Prime Video as well it just doesn’t make a huge amount of sense to keep Netflix going. The problem I have with streaming services is that their program depth is pretty shallow; they’ll have a couple of good films and then a lot of crap to make it look like they have a wide catalogue.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/01/this-week.htmlSun, 01 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/07/01/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Life The sun has been amazing so I’ve just been chilling out. I waw Iggy Pop and Queens of the Stone Age yesterday. For a 45,000 person concert the sound was pretty good, although it did get a bit mushy towards the end.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/24/this-week.htmlSun, 24 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/24/this-week.htmlpersonal computing 💻 I’ve splashed out on a Kindle. I came to the realisation that Google Play Books is essentially abandoned - it receives new books but there are a lot of issues with the content. The publishers care more about Kindle so the reader gets a better experience there. A refurbished Paperwhite also comes in at a pretty fair seeming price. Cooking 🍳 I had a Japanese week 2 weeks ago, tonkatsu and okonmiyaki.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/17/this-week.htmlSun, 17 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/17/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Now I’ve set up home assistant it’s showing me just how disfunctional Nest is. I’m not sure what there is smart about Nest. The most obvious way to determine if it should be in away mode is to watch a small number of MAC addresses to see if they’re within wifi range or not. This took 2 minutes to set up with home assistant.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/10/this-week.htmlSun, 10 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/10/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 I had a fruitful weekend setting up home assistant. My home is now getting smarter, with less data leaking to the outside world. All of this is within a VPN, allowing me to control my hifi while I’m out and about. I actually had to write a new component for home assitant to get my hifi working - something I should probably write up.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/03/this-week.htmlSun, 03 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/06/03/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 I’ve gone all in on home servers. I’ve upgraded my diskstation to a 218+, capable of really acting like a home server. That, combined with decent upload rates on my broadband, means I can start cutting ties with 3rd party web solutions. So far I’ve migrated from Pocket/Instapaper to Wallabag (running on docker), and from Inoreader to tt-rss (also running on docker). I’m really impressed with the moments app from synology, a genuine alternative to Google Photos.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/27/this-week.htmlSun, 27 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/27/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Technology 💻 With GDPR out this week it’s time to think even more about user privacy. There’s been an endless march forward in web browser technology without enough thought in what the technology is used for. Having large JS frameworks to build an enterprise tool is undoubtedly useful. Why is the same level of JS making it’s why into journalism. USA Today published a GDPR safe site with no tracking and less interactivity - it’s 1/10th the size of the regular site.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/20/this-week.htmlSun, 20 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/20/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Technology 💻 I’ve just bought a new doorbell and I’m shocked at how poor the choice of doorbell is. Even buying a good brand of doorbell, it’s still not great - too quite, poor sounds. I think this is about as good as it gets without getting something like a Ring, which I have no intention of doing. I assume people just aren’t willing to spend any money on doorbells so nobody invests in producing a good one.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/13/this-week.htmlSun, 13 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/13/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Technology 💻 I’ve got my NAS hooked back up to my TV and hi-fi. I’m enjoying digging through some old tracks that I just wouldn’t have listened to on spotify. There’s definitely something to be said for owning tracks, rather then streaming, and carefully choosing what to invest in. It’s also clear that Spotify is underpriced, and Netflix must be very underpriced. Is there going to be a reckoning someday when these services become significantly more expensive.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/06/this-week.htmlSun, 06 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/05/06/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Technology 💻 Spent the week getting deeper into Ruby on Rails. I still find it slightly bizarre that Ruby as a language is almost entirely dependent on the rails framework. Life ⽣ Bank holiday weekend means hanging out with friends, eating good food at Singburi and Arch Rivals and just chilling out.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/29/this-week.htmlSun, 29 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/29/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Technology 💻 Picked up a pair of (bluetooth headphones)[https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0756T7R5T/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1] for my commute and gardening. I’m sick of getting the cable caught on things. There’s a trade off between convenience and audio quality, but when you get too much cable noise from wired headphones I’m not sure that’s a bad trade off. I’m still on the fence about the trend of moving the DAC out of phones and into headphones/external devices, and how that plays forward with laptops.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/22/this-week.htmlSun, 22 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/22/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Computers 💻 Now I have a separate work laptop I’ve been looking at making configuration sync better between devices. I’ve re-arranged my dotfiles repo to be the right structure to use Gnu Stow, which creates symlinks in your home folder to the directory it’s run in. This seems to be a bit of a hidden but amazingly useful tool. Garden 🏡 I spent a lot of time in the garden this week, getting some Sun and making things neat and tidy for Spring.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/15/this-week.htmlSun, 15 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/15/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: Not doing anything other than being on holiday. Life ⽣ Just had a week in San Francisco. 🇺🇸 Really enjoyed the city. Amazing food at these places: Kin Khao Mister Jiu’s Mission Chinese Food Mr. Holmes Bakehouse Barnzu Nopalito Jane on Larkin I’m definitely re-considering whether to fly with BA in the future. We didn’t get the seats we had paid extra for on the way out, meaning I’ve now got to go through a refund process.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/01/this-week.htmlSun, 01 Apr 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/04/01/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Getting up to speed with ruby and Active Record. Stepping away from facebook. Couldn’t really work out what value it was providing me. Swapped from feedly to Inoreader for RSS. It just feels like Inoreader is more maintained. cooking 🍳 Kiln - Great thai restaurant in Soho, although could do with a little more spice. Homemade cheesy beef udon noodles. Homemade hot cross buns 🐇 Guinea Fowlers - Who wouldn’t want fried guinea fowl?https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/25/this-week.htmlSun, 25 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/25/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 The work of maintaining a config repo on github paid off. New laptop set up, with my preferred window manager and keybindings, in an hour. cooking 🍳 Aubergine Jamabalya - great vegan recipe although it would benefit from the addition of some kind of smoked sausage. Morito - Every dish is worth having. District Mot - Little Saigon have rebranded and the food is just as good as it always has been.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/18/this-week.htmlSun, 18 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/18/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Fixed my wifi firmware, although I suspect I may have to reapply the fix on subsequent kernel upgrades. cooking 🍳 Black Pepper Chicken Dinner at Lyle’s by Sota Atsumi, formerly of Clown Bar in Paris. Life ⽣ Picked up the new car. Got food poisoning, which knocked me out for most of the week.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/11/this-week.htmlSun, 11 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/11/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 My wifi firmware keeps crashing. Combined with not having netctl-auto setup correctly this is really annoying. Had a big fight getting testing working with Clojurescript. An update seems to have broken the flow that I’ve successfully used on previous projects. It’s a good reminder of how immature it is as a language. Reworked my personal config to make use of a separate PGP encrypted credentials file.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/05/figwheel-environment-setup.htmlMon, 05 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/05/figwheel-environment-setup.htmlThe standard figwheel template doesn’t implement unit-testing and static code analysis out of the box, 2 things that I always need. This is how I set up my figwheel dev environment from the basic template. First I start with the lein-figwheel template. lein new figwheel <project-name> -- --reagent This creates a simple shell of a reagent application. It’s a good starting point, but we need testing. doo The key plugin for testing is doo.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/04/this-week.htmlSun, 04 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/03/04/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Fixed a couple of bugs in bookmark manager. Did a fair amount of refactoring while I was at it. Rust’s type system and helpful compiler output really makes this easy (until you hit a “borrow” problem). Expanded out some of the functionality of my Todoist CLI App, including adding an interactive mode with tab completion. Played around with a bit of HTML, migrating my bookmarks display to use a flexbox for layout.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/26/2048.htmlMon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/26/2048.html2048 is a pretty simple matching game that massively took off a couple of years ago. The original game was implemented in a weekend so it makes it a good candidate to replicate in clojurescript. I’ve taken a similar approach to tic-tac-toe but have also added in tests and spec to round things off. Game state Seeing as we’re using clojure spec, let’s start with the definitions for the game board.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/26/2048.htmlMon, 26 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/26/2048.html2048 is a pretty simple matching game that massively took off a couple of years ago. The original game was implemented in a weekend so it makes it a good candidate to replicate in clojurescript. I’ve taken a similar approach to tic-tac-toe but have also added in tests and spec to round things off. Game state Seeing as we’re using clojure spec, let’s start with the definitions for the game board.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/19/tic-tac-toe.htmlMon, 19 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/19/tic-tac-toe.htmlTic-tac-toe is a great game to implement when learning a language. The rules are very simple, and it allows you to play with a couple of different data structures. In fact, the official React tutorial is exactly this. I’ve implement Tic-tac-toe using reagent in clojurescript. The main code file is only 62 lines, with some styling in CSS. Game state The game state can be represented in a very simple atom.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/04/this-week.htmlSun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/04/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Went to London Clojure Dojo meetup, where we hacked together a playable version of tictactoe. We didn’t have time to implement a victory checker so I did that after the fact. My version of the application is on github. Coded up a version of 2048. This was surprisingly easy to do with clojurescript. Realistically about 1 day’s work to get something feature complete but a but ugly, including some unit tests.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/04/this-week.htmlSun, 04 Feb 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/02/04/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 My pull request for typeshed has finally been approved. There are definitely some things about python type handling that I don’t like. The idea of typed python is great, but I suspect until there’s another major version increment it’ll always feel bolted on. Fixed my font preference order in Arch linux. I was getting some funky rendering of numbers in Firefox, but all is good now.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/28/this-week.htmlSun, 28 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/28/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Fixed a small bug in bookmark manager where blank lines weren’t handled correctly. Updating my clojure environment in advance of the London Clojure Dojo on Tuesday. Fighting with a couple of bugs(?) in todoist’s API. Waiting on a response before I fix my command line app. Trying to resolve issues on my typeshed pull request for pymysql. Retrofitting a type system onto python may just be a futile idea.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/28/this-week.htmlSun, 28 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/28/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing 💻 Migrated blog to a new Jekyll theme - minimal mistakes Wrote up the blog post on how I code tic-tac-toe in clojurescript. You can read it here. cooking 🍳 Mapo Tofu from Omnivores Cookbook. Chicken Biryani from Maunika Gowardhan. My first real failure with one of her recipes. I think the problem was just too much rice so should be able to fix it in the future.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/21/this-week.htmlSun, 21 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/21/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: personal computing added ability to refresh all icons in bookmark manager. I also learned a bit more about how to best handle Results in Rust. auto switching on wifi networks seems to be broken. Not an easy problem to solve without being able to easily turn different access points on and off to test. cooking Pasta with almond, basil and pecorino. I definitely need to learn to allow the fresh spaghetti to dry out a bit before cooking it.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/14/this-week.htmlSun, 14 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/14/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: work monitoring the fallout from meltdown/spectre. personal computing more work on bookmark manager. Better handling of icon locations. migrated email to fastmail. house dismantled, cleaned and refit the bath trap. tied up the monstera (relearned the butcher’s knot). cooking black pepper chicken with parathas. beetroot and lamb curry. spicy pork wontons. eating out Kin, Leather Lane Koya barhttps://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/07/this-week.htmlSun, 07 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/07/this-week.htmlThis week I have been: coding hacking on bookmark-manager. implementing type hinting in python for work. improving the type stubs for pymysql fix the types for codecs.iterdecode mypy doesn’t work with monkey patching Mypy Github Issue #2427 set up github pages for my new blog. cooking Asian orange sesame cauliflower—⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Baked Gochjang tofu—⭐⭐⚝⚝⚝ house bought a Boston Fern to try and reduce humidity in bathroom.https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/01/new-year-new-blog.htmlMon, 01 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000https://www.danielbowman.co.uk/2018/01/01/new-year-new-blog.htmlThis blog is going to be a lot more general purpose than my previous attempts at blogging. With a bit of luck that will mean I might carry it on for a bit longer than the 2 to 3 posts that I normally do before giving up. I’m not going to commit to anything in advance, other than a weekly update of things that I’ve been particularly working on.