Posts Tagged "2016"
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Top Reads for 2016
2016 certainly did become the year that was, with a series of unfortunate events leading to the internet becoming quite morose and anachronistically blaming an arbitrary timescale for their misery. It’s basically become The De-facto Most Unpopular Year On The Internet.
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I Migrated A Project To ReactJS For The First Time And Didn't Die
Before I start: a note on Javascript fatigue
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KD-Tree fun in QuestionTime
This past week, I was working on QuestionTime, and needed to work out where the nearest points of interest were to the user’s location in an expedient fashion. Now, the last time I did anything involving location data, my queries were ridiculously slow, and would not have held up to...
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Documenting Your Schemas
Last week I spent some time reading about using message queues like RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka as stream data systems. In the process I found an awesome article on the reasons why LinkedIn built and open sourced Kafka. It has some excellent learnings that can be applied to any event source...
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Unit Testing From First Principles
So you've heard about the wonderful world of test driven development. Maybe you want to take advantage of continuous deployment options, which build on the confidence that testing provides. Or, perhaps you've inherited a messy system full of cross references and you want to do a bit of refactoring. Unit...
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Things I Learnt From Android's Swagger Client Codegen
Over the past few days I've had a lot of struggles generating a Swagger-compatible QuestionTime API client for Android. Quickly for those who aren't aware: Swagger allows you to write API doc for your HTTP web API, and automatically generate clients for multiple platforms and nice HTML documentation for it. I've...
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Name Shaker
This semester, I'm studying a new course, "Prototyping Physical Interactions", that's aimed at strengthening students' problem solving skills using the new class of IoT devices that exist around us. The first assignment is pretty simple - demonstrate the use of a physical sensor to provide input for a system, and produce...
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Tutorial: Roll Your Own User Authorisation Management With Flask-Login
I'll quickly go through how I did user authentication and authorisation within Flask in this project, because it's annoying having to synthesise multiple best practices into one. There are other tools, like flask-bouncer, that do this for you, but I found them far too difficult to configure in my experience. First, create...
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The Limits of LINQ
This week, I decided to tackle a particularly nasty piece of code in our code base: a repository class built on top of DynamoDB, that was written before we had much understanding of how the DynamoDB library in C# worked (and before I understood how DynamoDB worked, truth be told)....
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Building my first production web app in Python
"Build a responsive web app with a basic CMS from scratch for the first time, with minimum understanding of user requirements, and have it production ready in two months? Sure!" This was me sarcastically at the beginning of June. I was incredibly skeptical, but the four of us interns (one...
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Managing JavaScript in SharePoint (Using RequireJS)
SharePoint is a collaboration tool that developers and other IT professionals love to hate. It works to the point where businesses are happy to leave it as their main "information sharing and collaborating" infrastructure. It is, however, clunky, slow and painful to change or customize from an end user perspective. I've...
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Python On A Mac
I spent the best part of this morning mucking around with Python configs, so I've outlined the best practice way of developing in Python on a Mac. You should do this if you don't want to run into troubles down the line with your development environments. Why this setup? Sure,...
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The (r)Evolution of Public Discourse In The Internet Age
The internet has given us a wider scope for debate and public discourse than ever before, and with it the ability to further develop ourselves. As he sat down last January to write what would become a popular and controversial piece on social media usage amongst teens, Andrew Watts probably did not...
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Loading Spatial Data into Azure SQL Part 3
Continuing on with my work in querying spatial data in Azure SQL, I got stuck on the creation of a spatial index, which has been pointed out as being essential to the performance of an application making use of any kind of spatial data. This much is obvious, since the...
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Productivity, or: What I'm Using To Get Stuff Done This Semester
I thought I might write a bit about what I'm using this semester to get stuff done, and work smarter; it's a mixture of things I've been using for a long time, plus some tools I only picked up as of late. Sidenote: This article is being written during a huge bout...
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Apple Is Bad For Education
Apple's newfound interest in harnessing the education potential of the iPad and by extension its closed ecosystem isn't a great deal for society at large. Here's why.