I was a volunteer and organiser for codebar for several years and was heavily involved in outreach activities during my time at Cambridge. In the face of cuts to DEI initiatives, I believe that the lack of diversity at all levels of the tech sector seriously harms the sector.

Besides …

This is a collection of notes about time and related concepts. A future post will talk about the problems of representing time in computer systems, especially distributed systems. These notes will be occasionally updated.

Introduction

Time is taken to be a primitive concept that cannot be defined in terms of …

I have been reading – at a very shallow level – about category theory (wiki), and thinking about its applicability to software and system design for data engineering. This post is a loose collection of thoughts on the subject, and a manifesto for employing a more rigorous language when building such systems …

Emergency services, GPs, hospitals, transportation systems and the like are funded, at least in part, by public money. When their computer systems go down, the public is badly affected and people can get hurt, and lives can be put at risk. So what regulations and quality controls are there on …

Having reliable, detailed but searchable logs is an essential part of any application, especially of long-running services that need to be debugged and monitored for uptime and stability. As one of the oldest modules in the Python standard library, the logging module provides a very powerful set of tools for …

The basic way to create and initialize an object in Python is using the default constructor, defined as the __init__() method:

class MyClass:
    def __init__(self, x: float) -> None:
        self.x: float = x
        print(f"created an object with x = {x}")


obj = MyClass(5)

Usually, initial values of instance variables …

A little investment into building a GUI for live visualizations and control provides huge improvements in iteration speed.

I recently came across the excellent video Coding Adventure: Simulating Fluids wonderfully explained by Sebastian Lague. The video walks through the steps to build a simple smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation from nothing …

Originally written May 2022.

Introduction

In his dialogue Phaedrus, Plato has unflattering things to say about the development of writing, arguing among other things that it weakens the memory:

And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared …

I recently asked the following questions:

Assuming all other requirements are the same:

1. Is a vegan a vegetarian?
2. Is a vegetarian a vegan?

To my (somewhat) surprise, this drew quite a lot of interest from colleagues, friends, and even people on Facebook I hadn't talked to for years, with lots …

This website is now self-hosted on a Raspberry Pi server at home. I had struggled with nginx and HTTPS in the past, so was rather pleasantly surprised to see how straightforward it was.

I couldn't find anything on the web that walked one through the whole process, so here are …