There was an interesting thread recently on Hacker News about advice to give to junior developers. A lot of interesting feedback cropped up but I want to put my two cents up for posterity.

Back in the late 90s, I got my first taste of hardware-accelerated gaming with an underrated racing game: POD. This was resurrected by GOG a few years ago with proper support for the latest Windows. How did it hold up?

One of the methods of communication over the internet that software developers favour are mailing lists. I don’t know much about the history of mailing lists but they pre-date forums, Q&A sites like Quora or StackOverflow, blogs, comment threads, and most of the many other ways that people talk to each other via the World Wide Web.

They also annoy the hell out of me. I was reminded of this yesterday when investigating an issue with Postgresql.

Unheralded: where I wax lyrical about music that you probably haven’t heard before

When developing a website in Python, you must make a number of decisions. What framework to use is one: will it be the extremely lightweight approach of Werkzeug or Bottle to the big heavyweights such as Django or Turbogears? Will it process requests using the simple synchronous threads or take advantage of asynchronous approaches like Tornado or aiohttp? These are all important decisions that will effect how you write the code and limit you in some crucial ways. But what about the WSGI layer?

With my recent purchase of a lovely new Thinkpad T480s from Lenovo, I’ve been experimenting with using Windows as my main driver after a hiatus of several years. It’s quite different from both MacOS and Linux (obviously!) but with the advent of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) a lot of my previous pain points are gone. Except for one: a decent terminal emulator. This is what I did.

As part of my general readings, I came across an interesting tool called Juju. It’s developed by Canonical and my best attempt at describing is that it is a macro-infrastructure provisioning tool. But my initial experience was poor because their tutorial simply didn’t work out of the box.

A common approach to architecting a platform in the software industry is microservices. There appear to be fundamental issues with it though. Every now and again, somebody writes an article about their bad experiences with it and online forums respond, loudly declaring they’re doing it wrong. Is it any wonder though, when it’s so poorly understood?

Browsing the HackerNews thread on a recent article criticising Apple keyboards, I was amused by a common discussion that always crops up on a subject like this: is Linux a viable alternative to Mac OS? To which the answer is always the same: no. But why is that?

My previous post went on about how soccer has gotten dull from, paradoxically, a surfeit of competitiveness. How wrong I was. If the past ten days have shown anything, it’s that international football is in rude health.