Featured. Credit where credit's due - but what about the developers?
My team, along with a couple of other teams, recently released a new feature at work. This is a cause for celebration! The release was marked with some…
Software engineer, NZ → UK. Notes on code, AI, and building a word game on the side.
Occasional writing on .NET, TypeScript, tooling, and shipping Hang Five.
2024
Featured. Viral times at Hang Five
It's been a busy week at Hang Five. I've written about this a little in the Hang Five newsletter (yes, there's a Hang Five newsletter, please subscribe) but…
2023
Some stats about Hang Five
I thought I'd quickly share some stats about Hang Five. We are now at game #100. It's actually our 101st game, because we started at 0! In the past 100 days…
Featured. Introducing Hang Five, your new favourite word game
My wife Amy and I recently went to Indonesia on a trip around Bali, Flores and Lombok. Amy bought a few word puzzle books at the airport in Wellington. We…
Will Meta's Threads be successful?
📅They seem to have brought the launch forward. It's now saying Thursday 11am NZT! On Friday at 2am (NZT), we'll get to see Meta's not-that-long-awaited…
How to find all the repos that reference a specific contract using GitHub CLI
If you work with a large codebase that spans multiple repositories, you might have encountered the problem of finding all the places where a certain contract or interface is used.
Featured. Will AI kill factual writing?
We've been living in a post-LLM world for about 6 months now. Some are saying that the hype is dying down. Search trends for ChatGPT are dropping the same way…
Featured. Exploring Native Ahead Of Time Compilation in .NET: Pros, Cons, and Possibilities
Before code written by a programmer can be executed by a computer, it needs to go through a process called compilation. It takes what a human (well, some of…
Featured. Cheating at work with ChatGPT
My first recorded chat with ChatGPT was on 9 December 2022. I asked it to "Write a prequel to Humpty Dumpty". It was pretty good, telling me that: Humpty…
Featured. Switch expressions in C#
A recent introduction to the C# language is pattern matching. It was added in C# 7.0, which came out in March 2017, along with Visual Studio 2017 and .NET…
Featured. A new(sletter) journey
Hi! I've decided to give the blog a revamp, and actually relaunch it as a newsletter. I'll be writing about software development and general technology things…
What's new in .NET 7
.NET 7 was released a few months ago, and it brought many exciting new features. As a .NET developer, I am particularly interested in the changes that affect…
2021
What's inside My Vaccine Pass? (Part 1)
When they were talking about how vaccine passports might work, I had an idea of how I’d make such a system. A QR code with some information about each person…
2017
Why does Docker restart all containers regularly?
For as long as I can remember, every now and then, all my Docker containers restart. I had no idea why. I am running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial). I got the exact…
2016
View a config file without comments
Sometimes you have a config file that has is heavily annotated (which is great). But sometimes you just want to see the actual configuration without all that…
Importing a Maildir using Dovecot
I’m looking into using Dovecot as a way to store all my old emails (I have emails going back 20 years would you believe!) Before I commit to it though, I am…
Re-signing an Enterprise iOS app
If you have an in-house app that you’ve distributed across your organisation as part of the iOS Enterprise program, you may find that the app stops working or…
Setting up SSL on an AWS Elastic Load Balancer
Here’s how to get an SSL certificate (from DigiCert) and install it on your AWS ELB. Step 1: Create the CSR SSL is a form of PKI (public key infrastructure)…
2015
DOS to Unix line endings with bash
This is a command that works in Git Bash on Windows to recursively replace \r\n line endings with \n. It uses Perl. There’s probably a version that uses sed…
Replacing a domain name in WordPress with sed
I often need to do this, but always forget the syntax. So this is more for my reference than anybody else’s: sed 's/<OLD DOMAIN>/<NEW DOMAIN>/g' <INFILE>.sql >…
2013
Samsung S4 browser slow with bad performance? Force Chrome on Android!
The stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy S4 (launched with the “Internet” icon) has notoriously poor performance, particularly with JavaScript. In my particular…
Core Data validation errors appearing twice, multiple times
Stupid thing really. I’m using validation in Core Data for the first time. I have a managed object, it fails validation, which is good. I fix it, and save…
2012
What can I do on Windows 3.1?
I installed Windows for Workgroups 3.11 over the weekend. Finally got networking up today. I’m writing this post from Netscape 3.0. I tried to install IE5.01…
2011
Got a number but no name? Facebook will tell you!
There’s been a bit of news about Facebook’s new (or at least newly publicised) Contacts feature. The gist of it is that when installing the mobile app, you can…
Where are the home and end keys on a Chromebook?
I’m writing to you on my shiny new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook, which I was sent by Google after the Google I/O conference in San Francisco earlier this year…