My highly-idiosyncratic list of interesting people on Mastodon

I've been really enjoying moving from the crumbling mess of Twitter, to the chaotic federated world of Mastodon. Plenty of other people have talked about the reasons, I'm not going over...

Sharing here as this was a world of pain, and maybe I can save someone else this pain.

Information is as of November 2022 - earlier advice on the web is wrong, and this may well be wrong in the future too.

So, a friend gave us some cash as a present...

It depends which bits of Twitter you want

I've been back on Mastodon in the past week, given the Twitter mess, and I've come to the realisation that I have two main patterns of Twitter usage - and Mastodon is a great option for one of them.

My Twitter...

My sabbatical is winding up, I naturally got far less coding done than I expected! Our lovely daughter has had a big sleep regression, so a lot of my focus has been on just getting through life rather than perfecting my code.

Still, I have actually...

A geeky kind of sabbatical

I am on sabbatical! After 10 years at Thoughtworks, I'm getting a nice long break. (I've actually been on sabbatical for a few weeks - school holidays plus usual procrastination delayed this post…)

I had to decide, a...

Long time no blog

I don't often post personal things here, but I thought after a 15 month gap I should put something up.

We are all well and happy here, but since late 2020 I was incredibly busy at work - working on a "Red team" review of a major...

If you want a quick look at the explorer, you can see a simple demo here or a more complex one here. There is also a documentation site at https://polyglot.korny.info (currently a work-in-progress).

Welcome to the Polyglot Code Explorer

The Polyglot...

Disclaimers

I'm not a React nor a D3 expert. I'm too much of a generalist these days to consider myself an expert in anything really! I am happy to be told how to correct or improve any of these examples, and of course don't just copy me - take...

(TL;DR - you can jump ahead to the sample site at https://kornysietsma.github.io/digital-garden-sample/ based on source and content at https://github.com/kornysietsma/digital-garden-sample )

Update: I've also used these techniques to build a covid19...

UPDATE 27 July 2020 - I've added some bits below for ssh-agent problems

This is another "I do this a lot so am blogging about it for future me" article. There is a lot of info about this out there, but doesn't tend to be in a single place, so I'm...

Testing and Agile

I've seen testing, especially acceptance testing, done horribly wrongly over the years, and sadly I often see the same anti-patterns repeated over and over; so I thought it'd be worth talking about my perspectives on this thorny subject...

(File under: obscure hacks that I'm blogging mostly so I can re-create them in the future when I've forgotten what I did to make this work)

This is a neat hack I worked out a couple of months ago, while I was scanning in some recipes - I wanted a...

This isn't actually all that new - I hacked this together during a global day of coderetreat in Melbourne in 2012 - but I've mentioned it to a few people, and thought it'd be fun to put here:

Conway's Game of Life in Excel

Yes, it's a functioning...

So, last significant update was 2014 - and most of the posts before that were about clojure. (I used to have a personal blog as well at blog.sietsma.com but it's a bit of a fiction separating tech from life from people stuff! Besides, I almost never...

I'm moving everything to Google Domains as I don't see the value in paying for complex hosting. I'm using github pages for hosting static sites like this one - I'll see how it scales, it doesn't have unlimited scale but I don't think I get that many hits!

I'm planning to build a proper clojure snippets/cheat-sheet page, for all the things I do regularly, or want to encourage team members to do regularly. But it's easier to blog these to get them out rapidly, I'll try to format them nicely later.

This is a bit of an addendum on my previous post. - I wanted to convert some FreeMind mind-maps into other formats. FreeMind is pretty cool, especially as it's file format is fairly straightforward XML, so lots of other mind mapping programs, like XMind, will read and write FreeMind files.

"XML is like violence - if it doesn't work, use more"

Clojure is awesome for parsing and processing structured data. It has a wide range of functions for handling lists, maps (associative arrays), sets, and (if you really need them) objects.

One great example of the power of clojure for this sort of thing is processing xml. You may hate xml, you may use json or edn or yaml or anything else you can - but ultimately, xml is still all over the place, and if you need to handle complex xml or large xml, you might want to look at clojure.

My old blog at trouble.net.au seems to have died - and it hadn't been updated for ages.

So I'm starting a new one here, at http://blog.korny.info - there isn't much here right now, but I will work on that soon.

The blog is being built with middleman