Code artisans

I’m exploring this idea that code can be artistic, functional, usable, but also beautiful in construction and form. I consider code beauty analogous to readable and reasonably efficient. Reasonably efficient because I’ve found that eking the last few percent in terms of performance typically lessens readability. Mostly readable because I think that maintainability is crucial [...]

OWASP NZ Conference

OWASP SLOC Count

Today I attended the OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) conference held at Auckland University.  This post follows the timeline of the day, with photos. The Eight-Thirty cafe had a pleasant coffee I enjoyed while the registration people got all set up.  I got in quick before the masses arrived. Attendance was high this year [...]

Notable Quote Web API

You might not have noticed the quotes web api that has serves the ‘Quote of the Day’ on my main site’s homepage.  Underlying it is a JSON web api that you can incorporate in to your own apps or website.  This post will describe how you might do that using javascript. To begin it is [...]

NDC Sydney

Just got back from a wonderful week of geeky goodness at Sydney’s Norwegian Developer Conference (NDC) with many insights gained of Docker and Kubernetes, dot net core performance improvements and cross-platform development with MVVM light. Kubernetes and Docker on Windows with dot net core is just awesome.  Hossam Barakat had a great presentation where he [...]

Humpridge Track

The Hump ridge track was a three day hike on the southeast edge of Fiordland National park and on the south coast of New Zealand’s south island.  Since the track was done in the middle of winter with limited daylight hours the challenge was to cover the 20 kilometers each day and get to the [...]

Hiking the Kepler to Luxmore Hut

Hiking the Kepler to Luxmore Hut post image

We did the first bit up to Luxmore hut because it was the middle of winter so unfortunately the avalanche risk prevented any further safe passage at that time of year. Our day started with meeting the Water Taxi across the lake Te Anau.  Unfortunately the boat driver didn’t recognise us at the marina, so [...]

Improved javascript global handler

Revisiting an old post about adding a global javascript error handler to your website.  The reason that is valuable is because many things interfere with javascript in the browser, not least plugins that operate by injecting javascript in the webpage. As I was recently engaged to make some javascript I thought I’d use the same [...]

AWS Kinesis Meetup

The Auckland Amazon Web Services (AWS) Meetup gave a good introduction to the Kinesis real-time stream analytics setup and integrations.  This post is not a review, just some info for people thinking of joining. Location Held at the Grid Auckland, a business incubator near the Auckland waterfront. Venue The venue in the John Lysaght building [...]

F# Meetup with Sam Williams

F# type providers

F# type providers

Really good Meetup with the F# community last Tuesday. The image is of type providers, a wonderfully powerful F# feature. Here’s some links: http://www.codingwithsam.com/ Finally here’s a good introduction on the monad. http://programming-journal.org/2018/2/12/ Many thanks to MYOB for hosting, and Sam for the enthusiastic tutorial. I really did learn a lot, and look forward to [...]

Serverless dot net core on AWS

It can be relatively simple to get started with serverless and this post will show you how. Serverless computing is the future of the cloud according to Mark Russinovich the head of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. Serverless provides three critical benefits: abstracts the servers so you can focus on the code, is auto-scalable, is event-driven [...]