Blog

Bitplanes in a Sokoban Level Solver

I've been building a Sokoban editor and solver for tilebasedworlds.com — a side project for tile-based puzzle tools. The solver ships entirely in the browser as a WASM binary, which meant the first real question was not "how do I implement A*?" but "how do I represent a level?" …

Tail Call Optimisation in Haskell and JavaScript

A tail call is a function call that is the last thing a function does before returning. That sounds like a minor implementation detail. It isn’t. Whether a runtime honours tail calls — replacing the current stack frame rather than pushing a new one — is the difference between …

Picking the Apple Tree

Growing up in the country meant casual jobs were farmhands or anything manual work related. When apple picking season came around, there was always a need for available hands which meant pocket money! I never thought it would give me analogies for later life. The first …

How I Was Convinced to Take Rust Seriously

In the previous article I described a path from dynamic languages toward TypeScript, and from TypeScript toward stricter compiled languages. Rust is the end of that path — but it took some convincing to get there, and the thing that convinced me wasn't the systems programming …

Why I Stopped Learning Python, Ruby and PHP and Went All In on TypeScript

Around 2020 I made a deliberate decision to stop language tourism — spreading effort across Python, Ruby, and PHP — and consolidate around TypeScript. I haven't looked back. The Context Switch Cost For several years I was maintaining professional fluency across multiple languages …

SQLite in 2026

I wrote my first SQLite article in 2011 while debugging an Adobe AIR app. The problem was a quoting edge case; the solution was a one-liner. SQLite was a curiosity — a file-based database you used when you didn’t want to run a server. Fifteen years later, SQLite is having a …

npm Commands You're Probably Not Using

Most developers know npm install, npm run, and npm publish. The rest of the CLI tends to be discovered only when something breaks — which is the worst possible time to learn a debugging tool. These are the commands I’ve found myself reaching for repeatedly, in rough order of how …

Data Sources for R — EDA Across a Heterogeneous Stack

R has a reputation as a statistics tool — the thing you reach for when you need a regression or a publication-quality plot. That framing undersells it. The part of R that earns its place in a practical engineering workflow is its I/O story: the breadth of data sources it can …

WASM Tooling — A Practical Cheat Sheet

The WebAssembly ecosystem has accumulated a solid set of command-line tools that don’t get surfaced well in most introductory material. Tutorials tend to focus on one language path — Rust via wasm-pack, or Go, or Emscripten — and leave the broader toolchain unexplained. This is a …

Nim's Garbage Collection — From Automatic to None

One of the things that drew me to Nim is the degree of control it offers over memory management without forcing you to the extreme of a borrow checker. The default experience is a garbage-collected language that feels like Python. The far end of the dial is manual memory …

Static Images Are Losing the Engagement Battle

There is a measurable cost to serving static images. Not a performance cost — that’s a different conversation, one I covered in an earlier post on Cloudinary as a DAM. This is an engagement cost: the gap between what a user feels when they interact with a product image and what …

Responsive Images in HTML

A single <img src="hero.jpg"> used to be the only option. It still works — but it means serving a 2400px image to a device with a 375px screen, and serving that same image as a JPEG to a browser that would have accepted AVIF at a third of the file size. The browser has had the …

Array handling in JS with functional purity

Functional programming has influenced JavaScript style significantly over the last decade. Pure functions — those that produce no side effects and return the same output for the same input — are now a widely adopted convention. But JavaScript is not a pure functional language, …

Running Dokku Locally

Dokku is a self-hosted PaaS (Platform as a Service) that gives you a Heroku-like deployment experience on your own Linux box. A single wget command installs all the necessary tooling. From there, you configure SSH key access, set a git remote on your project, and git push to …

Cloudinary DAM

I was lucky enough recently to implement Cloudinary as a DAM solution on a project. A DAM being short for a digital asset manager. This is a type of cloud service typically used in the media and entertainment sectors. They’ve been around for decades but SaaS solutions have opened …

Toxic bias in the Javascript community

Having been in the Javascript community for a while I’ve witnessed the building momentum towards a Functional Programming (FP) style. I think Javascript and FP are great but there is perhaps a misguided favor or emphasis put on FP as something superior. The React community help …

Why I am using Go more

I’ve been subscribed to the Go mailing list for over 10 years. But I never really dived into the language. Work requirements never pushed me in that direction. In hindsight I regret not embracing it more. There are some qualities to it that really appeal to me. Particularly after …

Simulating Colour Blindness with ImageMagick

Colour blindness affects roughly 8% of men and 0.5% of women with Northern European ancestry. For a data visualisation that uses colour as the primary encoding — a choropleth, a multi-series line chart, a heatmap — that’s a meaningful share of the audience for whom the visual may …

SVG Path Functions

SVG paths are written as a single d attribute — a mini-language of commands and coordinates that describes shapes. Each command is a letter; uppercase means absolute coordinates, lowercase means relative to the current position. This is a reference for all path commands with …

Percona Toolkit for Managing MySQL Clusters

Running a MySQL cluster in production eventually teaches you that MySQL’s built-in tooling is optimised for the happy path. Replication works, until it doesn’t. Schema changes are fast, until the table has 80 million rows. SHOW SLAVE STATUS reports lag, but the number isn’t …

A New Reality: Human Values and World Population

A Kickstarter project finally arrived, it's a book called A New Reality: Human Values and World Population. It is a republication of a book originally by Jonas Salk. His son Jonathan Salk created this project to release an updated edition. It talks about modern-day issues …

Chart Cheat Sheet

A reference for chart types, anatomy, and terminology — particularly useful when working with D3 or communicating design intent to engineers and stakeholders. Terminology Graph — a diagram representing a mathematical function or relationship between variables, typically drawn as …

Spartan Trifecta in Bright

We had an awesome weekend away in Bright, a small mountain town on the edge of Victoria Australia. Completing the Spartan race trifecta. The trifecta is where one completes all three of the Spartan race types (Sprint - 7km+, Super - 14km+ and Beast - 21km+). The sprint turned …

Lexical Complexity of Dante's Inferno

A corpus linguistics analysis of the original Italian text of the Divina Commedia — measuring vocabulary coverage thresholds and frequency distribution to quantify the reading challenge it presents to a learner of Italian. Background Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine …

Analysis of Harry Potter in German

A frequency analysis of Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen using Python and NLTK, exploring what corpus linguistics reveals about the vocabulary threshold for reading comprehension in a second language. Methodology The source text was processed using NLTK (Natural Language …

Netbeans & Silver Stripe

OK quick note, Netbeans is an awesome IDE. Love the debugging options an set to xdebug default options. So it just works when running Linux PHP Xdebug. Was a life changer when someone showed me how about six months ago. Silver Stripe is also an awesome PHP framework/cms. But .ss …

Cassandra CQL

So apart from needing to redesign/rebuild my site, I really need to start writing more about my experiments. More for my own record than a public one. Recently started playing with the whole Nutch family (Hadoop, MapReduce, Hbase, Pig, Solr, Nutch,… etc). I finally got Nutch 2.1 …

Bitmap to ByteArray

Some notes about using sprites from Flash Professional in Flash Builder. 1 When adding Sprites or Movie Clips to a Flex application add them to a UIcomponent first or use rawChildren.addChild() to avoid run time errors. fx:Script spritecanvas.addChild(new Sprite()); // OR …

Cloning Eloquent Models in Laravel

Duplicating an Eloquent model — without its primary key, without timestamps, without accidentally overwriting the original record — is a small problem with a few subtly wrong solutions before you arrive at the right one. The clone keyword PHP has a built-in clone keyword that …

Flash Professional & Flash Builder Compatibility with Sprites

Some notes about using sprites from Flash Professional in Flash Builder. When adding Sprites or Movie Clips to a Flex application add them to a UIcomponent first or use rawChildren.addChild() to avoid run time errors. <fx:Script> spritecanvas.addChild(new Sprite()); // OR …

Autumn Fog in Schwabenhiem

Joomla 1.5 Component with Jquery and Mootools

I’ve been building a component for Joomla 1.5 and I really wanted to use Jquery in the admin over Mootools. Unfortunately Googling for this answer is tricky as so many people are posting examples how to remove Joomla js from their frontend template. The following is very ‘hacky’ …

Stop Over in Korea

Adobe AIR SQLite ORM

A note from a series of posts on AIR and SQLite. At the time, I needed to put together an analytics tracking library for an AIR application — Google Analytics only supported Flex apps with DOM access, so it wasn’t available in AIR. That constraint pushed me toward building a …

Integer Primary Key as Rowid in SQLite

An interesting quirk about SQLite table primary keys. Coming from MySQL I had been using ID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT as a habit, but it turns out SQLite primary keys only behave as a rowid alias under specific conditions. This is worth getting right. Primary keys return …

Insert Or Update if row exists AIR SQLite

Following on from the previous post, here’s a solution for INSERT or UPDATE if the row exists — a fairly desirable behaviour that saves the usual SELECT if exists, then UPDATE else INSERT routine. This sounds like it would be a straightforward fix, but I couldn’t find a single …

3115 Error with SQLite

Spoiler: Double quote string values in SQLite statements (Possible solution this error is raised by many misconfigurations). With SQLite in Adobe AIR, I was running some initial tests to figure out a clever TRIGGER to UPDATE or INSERT appropriately. So far I’ve been writing all …

Javascript Date & Time Utilities

JavaScript’s built-in Date API is famously awkward. For most production work, Day.js is the right answer — it’s a 2kb drop-in that gives you immutable date objects, a chainable API, and a plugin ecosystem that covers almost every edge case. But if you’re keeping dependencies …