Posts

I love reading Uses This where people share their tools and workflows. I’ve sniped some great tools from their posts. And back in 2004 when I started the blog, one of my most popular posts was about the tools I’d moved over to as an Apple switcher and early adopter. Time for a 2017 refresh post.

The first thing that amazes me is how much the character of my desktop and tools have changed over a decade. I’ve also changed my tastes considerably to tool selection and usage. I’ve shifted over time to moving to simpler, well-designed tools, with a much greater emphasis on text formats and simpler syncing and future-proofing, as well as adding much fewer things judiciously rather than trying to jumping to the next shiny thing unless it has a clear and compelling value over my current stack in productivity or problems it can solve.

At some point in the lifecycle of any useful application you write, there will be a request to get something out of your system in Excel format. Here’s an easy, transparent method to get downloadable Excel reports out of your Padrino app.

Spreadsheets are still king in most organizations and Excel is still the main tool business users and decision makers comfortably interact with, often for for end user reporting, data consolidation, or intermediary analysis purpose.

The intersection of datascience and epidemiology offers amazing opportunities to enhance quality of life for vast swathes of at-risk people. A new superpower conferred by the advent of cheap, rapid genetic sequencing. It might even help us avert the increasingly likely risk of the next global pandemic.

Another great example of the power of off-book, part-time projects, NextStrain was hatched after the two researchers responsible met at a conference and talked about the idea. The reseachers who developed it, Richard Neher of the University of Basel and Trevor Bedford of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle both recently won the Open Science Prize for their contributions.

Let’s Encrypt has done an amazing job of making https the new normal for web sites and helping create a more secure and private internet by giving away free, automatic ssl certificates to domain owners.

You should be encrypting your web traffic (and need to, to take advantage of new protocols like http/2. Some implementations have stated they will only support http/2 over an encrypted connection. And currently, no browser supports http/2 unencrypted afaik.). Add to this the fact Google will start penalizing non-secured sites in search results, and https is fast becoming the de facto standard.

Padrino works great on heroku with just a simple git push heroku master, but you can get a surprising bump in performance simply from using Puma in production rather than the default heroku web server.

That also goes for using it on your local development machine, but heroku uses Procfile based spinning up of apps, so you should also test locally on your dev box, using heroku’s handy foreman before pushing it live to heroku.

It’s no secret that I read a lot. Even after you get through the technical and industry reading I do, I pretty voraciously tear through books (in 2017 so far, I’ve finished 16 books already.). My Kindle is daily carry. So, I get asked about book recommendations frequently.

These were the books I completed in 2016 and what I think you should add to your own lists and why. More importantly, a do not read list to save you valuable reading time.

When I moved to Singapore and got super busy building out Neo, the blog really started to become neglected.

It had always been a bit of a strange beast, meandering over 12 years and a hodge-podge mashup of travelogue, personal observations (more suitable to a journal), re-shared material, and things both professional and peripherally relevant or focused on work I was doing.

Lack of focus on something relevant and useful for readers (despite a handful of very popular posts) made me realize it was more for me than a reading audience, and made me feel it was time for a relaunch around the public service I had always intended the blog to be. And a higher commitment to quality over cruft.

Across Weirdish Wild Space, has been around for over twelve years now and is badly in need of a re-focus and some re-organizing.

So, the blog is on a short hiatus while I take some time to sift through old material, remove stuff that is better put in my journal, redesign a bit, and extract the useful audience-facing technical material that still belongs here.

Stand by. Be back soon-ish.

I just recently moved the blog over to jekyll as the Jekyll team got into releasing beta versions of its 3.0 release.

Despite it’s popularity in the Rails community for a while now (enough so it raised eyebrows at me having a roll-my-own blog system), up until 3.0 I had issues with Jekyll , but the new version seems to eliminate most of my larger bugbears.

Strangely, the big catalyst behind the move was themes (and an interesting point of how policy can drive behaviour), as Google announcing it was going to start punishing sites that were not mobile responsive in its search results had organic traffic (and my search rankings) drop by half the week google pulled the trigger on it. Redesigning my theme from scratch to be mobile responsive seemed a lot more work than modifying someone else’s theme. But, while that probably clinched it, there were other good reasons too:

Since I’ve moved back to using vim+tmux in the terminal for virtually all my writing and code editing (and gotten faster in a number of respects), one of the key things I’ve missed from Sublime Text 3 has been its excellent and speedy markdown preview in Chrome.

It was a friction point in moving back to terminal vim since an old plugin I’d used before was no longer available, and the fallback I’d had to render Github-flavoured markdown was to use a combination of Tim Pope’s Dispatch and the octodown gem . It had a number of issues, one of which was the time it took to shell out and then render the preview, but more than that, it just seemed to slow everything down.