Archives

In weeks 1 & 2, I got a Transperth-scraping REST API built and deployed to an AWS-based cloud host. This week I’ll get started on: Step 3: The iPhone App Third party apps on Apple Watch are very limited and rely heavily on the companion iPhone app for logic, network access, location etc, so the … read more

In Week 1, I got a (very) basic Haskell REST web service running that scraped the Transperth site for live train times. Now we’re up to: Step 2: Build & Deployment Like most developers working on side-projects, I don’t want to pay a bundle for hosting a service during development when it really … read more

Okay, I’m trying something new - a weekly blog post talking about my progress developing an app. The theory is that the thought of my massive readership expectantly waiting for the next update will give me enough of an incentive to get something finished. Everyone practise their sad face to make me … read more

I’ve just finished Erik Meijer’s FP101x “Introduction to Functional Programming” course, and it was a bit of a mixed bag. Note that this was my first MOOC, so take this review with a grain of salt. Firstly, the good. Erik’s lectures were well-paced and entertaining, and for the most part communicate… read more

I’ve been working from home more frequently the past few months for some reason, so I eventually bit the bullet and constructed a permanent home workstation. I’ll post up more details of my setup later on, but when I tweeted a pic of my mic arm, it got a fair bit of interest, so I thought I’d give a… read more

I’ve been a fan of the Poppendiecks’ work on Lean Software Development for a while, so I was quick to sign up when I saw they were coming back to Perth as part of a YOW! Night. The talk was entitled ‘The Scaling Dilemma’, and covered issues encountered in scaling development teams beyond the popular… read more

I was recently working on an Elastic MapReduce Streaming setup, that required copying a few required Python files to the nodes in addition to the mapper/reducer. After much trial & error, I ending up using the following .NET AWS SDK code to accomplish the file upload: var mapReduce = new Streami… read more

My recent LinkedIn article ended with the conclusion: One thing that is clear to observers - Objective-C’s days are numbered. Apple management are not shy about killing off technologies that no longer suit them, and once they feel maintaining Objective-C is preventing further improvement, it will b… read more

To celebrate being granted publishing access on LinkedIn, I’ve put up a post with my thoughts about the new Swift language. I’ve tried my best to make it understandable & accessible for non-developers, but still present useful technical content. Check it out here. read more

Matt Baxter-Reynolds over at ZDNet claims that Swift is “a total mishit that’s badly judged the state of the software development industry” and that “What Apple should have done, years ago, was bought Xamarin”. I disagree with this on a number of levels. I think the crux of the argument hinges on th… read more