Translating my Grandfather’s biograpy
My grandfather, Dr Kornelis Sietsma was a Dutch Reformed Church minister in wartime Amsterdam. He preached in ways that offended the Nazi occupiers, and the...
Posts by Year
2024
Custom URI schemes in Obisidian (on a mac)
My youngest child started school this week, so I have a bit of time for blogging! This is another “a neat hack that I’m sharing partly so I remember how I d...
Refreshing multiple git repos
File under “blogging so I remember how I did this”… I often have the situation where I have a directory full of related git repositories related to one area...
2023
Playing with Rust and Copilot
The world is full of AI hype aright now - and often it’s blown out of proportion, both on the “everything is fine” side and the “machines are going to take o...
New job, new blog!
I quit my job! Yes, after 12 amazing years at Thoughtworks, I decided it was time to move on. I’m starting a new job in November - more on that later - but ...
2022
Interesting folks to follow on Mastodon
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...
Buying minecoins on a child’s Android Minecraft account
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 wro...
Is Mastodon a Twitter replacement?
It depends which bits of Twitter you want…
New polyglot code tools releases
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 ...
A geeky kind of sabbatical
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 ...
Hiatus
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, bu...
2020
Introducing the Polyglot Code Explorer
The Polyglot Code Explorer is my open-source tool for visualising complex codebases written in multiple programming languages.
Better D3 sites with react
My approach to get D3 to play nicely with React
Building a personal digital garden with Gatsby
Building a digital garden (obsolete, now I use Obsidian!)
multiple git identities
Configuring git to swap between identities easily
The swiss cheese model and acceptance tests
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 repeat...
2019
OCR Hack - grabbing text from the screen on a Macbook
My hacks to easily grab and OCR text on my mac
Excel life
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, an...
What on earth happened?
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...
2018
It’s alive!
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 on...
2014
Clojure snippets
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 ...
Parsing FreeMind files
Example of parsing FreeMind xml in clojure
Xml manipulation in clojure
“XML is like violence - if it doesn’t work, use more”
2013
A wild blog appears!
Starting a new blog in 2013