September 9, 2025

Lovin Miniflux

I’ve made some references in the past to my attempts over the years to replace Google Reader. Released in 2005 the functionality it offered was convenient. I have tried multiple times applications to replace this, but none offered the same level of simplicity. I love RSS as a concept because it empowers open decentralised distribution. The consumer gets to control the feeds they consume. You choose your feeds. As long as you’re just sorting by date there is no ‘algorithm’ nudging you in one direction or another.

November 15, 2024

A year of the Linux desktop

I have previously had multiple forays into Linux as my main desktop. This has generally ended with a return to macOS at some point for one reason or another. This pattern has recently repeated itself. However, I think it’s worth recording that this time the switch back was not due to any irreconcilable issue.

December 12, 2021

What I wished I'd known before working with Apache Camel

I recently started working on an Apache Camel project at work. The application in question would, I imagine, have been an atypical use case for Apache Camel. It was used primarily for the DSL definition of a series of RESTful calls to dependent services. These routes were leveraged by the application’s controller layer. My approach at the beginning and my approach by the end were pretty different. Unless stated the below are examples are taken from the Apache Camel Wish I’d Known sample code on GitHub.

January 10, 2021

Bond Project

While looking at various microservice patterns I found I wanted a playground for playing with components of a microservice based system in isolation. Coincidentally, in the halcyon days of winter 2019 I got an idea to binge all the James Bond films. Over the years I had seen them all. I generally watched them on television but never in any order and usually having missed the start. After having re-watched one of the movies I wrote down a very short hot take on each film.

December 18, 2020

Spring Handle Constraint Violation

My team recently had a requirement to build a persistence mechanism that had a unique constraint on a combination of columns. It needed to behave in an idempotent manner. If the same request was received to created an entity multiple times it would simply respond that the items existed. I spent a considerable amount of effort researching a solution and wound up with something immeasurably simpler than some of my early stabs at it.

April 26, 2019

Story Templates

I have been looking after some JIRA boards recently. Our team has developed some templates for outlining the requirements. We use the following ticket types:

Epic
Story
Improvement
Bug

March 4, 2019

Acer V5-122P display driver issue

I had a rather disappointing experience recently with an Acer laptop that I’d like to make a note of. I think the crux of the issue is a difference between the latest driver available and the best driver for a machine. The details are that the laptop is an Acer Aspire V5-122P. It is a cheap and cheerful laptop that I purchased for the following reasons: Backup machine in case my daily driver broke down, Low powered machine to test performance of websites, Laptop I could take travelling without undue stress as to it’s wellbeing.

October 30, 2018

My favourite bash shortcuts

I recently transitioned from using vi mode in bash to the default command line shortcuts. I had ignored them for a long time but after a brief period sitting and learning a few I no longer missed vi mode. Some of the key reasons that prompted me to change are: vi mode does not have a visual prompt, leading to unecassary escape smashing I only used the most basic motion command, eschewing a lot of the power of the vi commands When ssh’ing into other boxes the switch in interface is jarring.

March 29, 2018

What I’ve learned about cucumber js

CucumberJS is a NodeJS implementation of a test runner which is powered by the Gherkin syntax. It’s integration with our team workflow has been a boon to clarity of purpose for stories in firstly SCRUM and now KANBAN. Here I will share some of things we’re doing and the benefits we reap. When writing a story the team gathers around a screen and we work on a shared text. Straight away this increases collaboration and removes a lot of later disagreements around ‘I thought we said we would do X after Y’.

February 22, 2018

Delete last word

Coming from vim I´m used to a wide variety of keystrokes to manipulate text. The other day at work though my mind was blown when a colleague hit alt + backspace to delete the previous word in macOS. This was particularly useful because in Terminal I am used to pressing ctrl+w. This will delete the previous word as well, but it terminal it does not respect delimeters such as ´_/´_ or ´_-´_.