• Quick one: Running Cloudflare workers that send emails, locally

    I’ve been playing around with Cloudflare workers recently, which is a serverless compute platform with a number of handy capabilities and a pretty decent free tier.

    One of the things you can do with workers is to have them execute on a schedule defined by a cron expression. Unfortunately, if...


  • One Year with Haskell

    About a year ago I started on a bit of a journey…

    To set the scene, I’d been on a new team for a few months, and was still coming to grips with everything. The backend services that the team own are written in Scala, with a lot of functional...


  • On Getting Started With Phoenix v1.3.0

    When I first started becoming interested in Elixir one of the things that drew me to the language was how much attention Phoenix was getting. Articles such as hitting 2 million web sockets in Phoenix impressed me greatly, and really spurred on a building curiosity for distributed systems...


  • On Missing Language Features

    Spending time learning about and honing your craft is undeniably a good thing. You can pick up new skills, become more proficient in the skills you already have, and find new ways of solving problems you face in your day to day life. However, despite those upsides, one downside is...


  • On Playing with Elixir

    Elixir is a language I’ve been really wanting to toy with for a while. I’ve only done object oriented software development professionally, though in my readings of functional development some of the tenants have appealed to me. One thing that I’ve introduced in to my working life is a...


  • On Behold v0.0.3

    Update as of July 22, 2023

    As fun as mucking about with this stuff likely was back in the day, Behold is very much abandonware.

    I’ve recently deployed the latest version...


  • On Playing With Docker - Part 2

    In the previous post we covered ways in which I had been playing with Docker, ways in which I thought it could be useful, and we also quickly touched on the RESTful API.

    So as I mentioned previously, one of the biggest problems I have found with using...


  • On Playing With Docker - Part 1

    Oh boy, has it been a while since I’ve written anything. Well, I suppose now is a better time than any to break radio silence.

    Over the last 12+ months I’ve played with Docker to varying degrees. Docker scratches something of an itch for me. It fulfills that burning...


  • On Communication Skills

    The ability to effectively communicate with others is a skill that has been vital to the success of the human race, and yet this is an skill that “computer nerds” have stereotypically been lacking. The fact that the stereotype exists seems odd to me, because communicating is quite honestly the...


  • On The Art of Well Crafted Tasks

    It’s now common practice in software development circles to use issue tracking software to keep track of work being done. There are some full featured offerings available, such as Jira and Asana, as well as more humble tools available such as Trello, or GitHub Issues. However, something that perhaps isn’t...