Posts

Creating a “simple” three-up image layout in CSS

A step-by-step breakdown of how I made a one-left, two-right layout for my images. April 2022.

How do you work with non-engineers?

Building a relationship founded on trust and respect. October 2021.

Getting a monthly cloud costs report in Slack

Sending the AWS bill to Slack, so everyone can be more informed and intentional about spending. September 2021.

Listing deleted secrets in AWS Secrets Manager with boto3 and the AWS CLI

Diving into the internals of the AWS SDK to find deleted secrets. July 2021.

Drawing inner/outer strokes in SVG (clips and masks)

Showing how clips and masks work, and how they can be used to draw inner and outer strokes of a shape. March 2021.

How KempisBot works

How I reincarnated a fifteenth-century monk and taught him to use Twitter. January 2021.

Large things living in cold places

Using cold storage tiers to reduce the cost of storing Wellcome’s digital collections in the cloud. June 2020.

Storing language vocabulary as a graph

Experimenting with a way to store words and phrases that highlights the connections between them. April 2020.

Building Wellcome Collection’s new archival storage service

How we built the new cloud-based storage system for holding an ever-growing digital archive. February 2020.

This YAML file will self-destruct in five seconds!

YAML allows you to execute arbitrary code in a parser, even if you really really shouldn’t. December 2019.

How I scan and organise my paperwork

My procedure for scanning paper, and organising the scanned PDFs with keyword tagging. November 2019.

Adventures in Python with concurrent.futures

Some examples of how I’ve been using concurrent.futures to speed up my batch scripting in Python. October 2019.

Sans I/O programming: what, why and how (PyCon UK talk)

Code that pushes I/O to the boundary is simpler, easier to reuse and easier to test. October 2019.

Drawing with triangular coordinates in SVG

Some code and trigonometry for drawing shapes that don’t fit neatly into a rectangular grid. September 2019.

Getting a tint colour from an image with Python and k‑means

I want to display text next to an image that looks visually similar to the image, so I need to extract a tint colour. August 2019.

An inescapable conclusion

After months of introspection and soul-searching, I’ve had some big realisations about my identity. June 2019.

Reading a Chinese dictionary / 读一本中文字典

Although paper dictionaries are mostly a thing of the past, knowing how to use a Chinese dictionary helps me learn the rest of the language. June 2019.

Creating a locking service in a Scala type class

Breaking down some tricky code that allows us to lock over concurrent operations. May 2019.

Creating a GitHub Action to auto-merge pull requests

Saving myself the trouble of clicking that pesky “merge” button. March 2019.

A day out to the Forth Bridge

Photographs from a trip to North Queensferry to see the Forth Bridge, the Forth Road Bridge, and an unexpected light tower. March 2019.

Working with really large objects in S3

Code for processing large objects in S3 without downloading the whole thing first, using file-like objects in Python. February 2019.

Monki Gras 2019: The Curb Cut Effect

Slides and notes for my talk ‘The Curb Cut Effect’. Making something better for disabled people can make it better for everybody. January 2019.

My visit to the Aberdulais Falls

Pictures from my trip to the waterfalls and former tin plating works at Aberdulais. November 2018.

Assume worst intent (designing against the abusive ex)

How do we design services and platforms to reduce the risk of harassment and abuse from other users? September 2018.

Implementing parallel scan in DynamoDB with Scanamo

Prototype code for running a parallel scan against a DynamoDB table, and using Scanamo to serialise rows as Scala case classes. August 2018.

Ideas for inclusive conferences and events

A collection of ideas and suggestions for running conferences which are more inclusive and accessible. Based on my experiences at AlterConf, PyCon UK, and similar events. August 2018.

Drawing ASCII bar charts

A Python snippets for drawing bar charts in command-line applications. May 2018.

A plumber’s guide to Git

How does Git work under the hood? How does it store information, and what’s really behind a branch? November 2017.

Four ways to underline text in L^aT_eX

I’m very picky about the way underlines look, and have spent a lot of time trying to get the perfect underline in L^aT_eX. October 2017.

A visit to the Crossness pumping station

Pictures from my recent visit to Crossness, a Victorian pumping station for London’s sewers. June 2017.

The A stands for Asexual

A brief introduction to asexuality, what it means, and why it matters. October 2016.

Creating low contrast wallpapers with Pillow

Take a regular tiling of the plane, and apply a random colouring: voila, a unique wallpaper, courtesy of the Python Imaging Library. October 2016.

Tiling the plane with Pillow

Using the Python Imaging Library to draw regular tilings of squares, triangles and hexagons. October 2016.

Introduction to property-based testing

Testing with randomly generated examples can be a good way to uncover bugs in your code. June 2016.

Treat regular expressions as code, not magic

Regexes have a reputation for being unreadable monsters, but it doesn’t have to be that way. April 2016.