Hammy Goonan

Valé Terry Johal

Some time in the early 2000, Terry and I were both eagerly blogging away to our audiences of tens of people when we came into each other's orbits. We had mutual friends through RMIT. He was a PhD student lecturing in communications. We had mutual friends and several

Cherish the Nostalgia

Last week I mentioned the President of the Signal Foundation, Meredith Whittaker. She popped up in my Podcast feed on the 404 Media Podcast this week which was pleasing. In case you are unaware, 404 Media is a newish, journalist-founded digital media company doing some fantastic reporting and filling a

Diary of a digital vegan

Somewhat inspired by Justin Warren's 100th edition of The Crux (a highly recommended newsletter) I thought I'd try my hand at a weekly posts on the topics that have caught my eye. It'll be an eclectic mix of politics and tech which will probably

Updating my 'resources' repo

At [PEXA](https://www.pexa.com.au/), I'm lucky enough to work with a bunch of really smart passionate people who really care about their craft. As a result I'm exposed to a huge amount of resources that I'm finding really useful at a

Signing a user up to your Cognito Pool using the AWS NodeJS SDK

Next-Auth is wonderful, and I've been using it a lot lately. But it only handles the OAuth flow (ie the login / logout functionality) of Cognito. However you need to roll your own Sign Up functionality as that sits outside the OAuth flow. Digging through the documentation around implimenting

Sentencing laws

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk decision to increase penalties for violent crime is just going to leave more kids in gaol for longer making more career criminals. The vast majority of those kids will be Aboriginal or Torres Straight Islander and will never have a hope. It's disgusting. These

On AI

Update: don't read this, read much more informed people than me. This ChatGPT thing is pretty crazy, hey. I've got to say that as a software engineer with a healthy dose of imposter syndrome it makes me a little nervous. Are they going to take our

Optus data breach not a 'hack'

Please stop calling it a 'hack'. Optus left an API endpoint with the data of millions of current and former customers exposed to the public internet with no authentication required. Then to make matters worse, they used sequential IDs so that anyone that found that API endpoint could

What are your salary expectations?

No. What's your salary range? I don't want to waste anyone's time applying for a job that doesn't meet my salary expectations, so why not help us both out. If I was a little less generous of spirit, I'd have

Valé James Lovelock

I'm saddened by the news of the passing of James Lovelock. I remember first reading about the Gaia Hypotheses when I was doing my Masters degree. It spoke it me and really solidified a lot of my thinking about the environment and our place in it. There'

Django

Connecting to host database from a Docker container

Generally speaking, in a production environment, you don't want things like Nginx and your database running in Docker containers. You want those services running on the host and your application(s) in a container. The tricky part here is that localhost in a container is the container'

When the Currawongs come down from the mountains

I love birds, always have. Not a hardcore twicher or anything, just facinated by them and pay attention. Enough to feel quite moved when I see a Wedge-tailed Eagle. Enough for them to give me a sense of place. I lived overseas between 2010 and 2016. I went to Princes

Towards Continuous Integration

I've been using Ansible for deployment automation for a little while now and it's working really well for me. It doesn't take long for a Django website behind a load balancer to take a while to complicate which is where it's really

AWS

Hosting a static website in an S3 bucket with SSL gotchas

I recently deployed a static website to AWS using S3, CloudFront, Route 53 and the AWS Certificate manager. There we a few 'gotchas' in there so I thought I'd outline by process here for others: Certificate Manager Firstly, I created a free AWS SSL Certificate. It&

Django

Django 2 and Python 3

I just saw this tweet which I actually found a little discouraging. As of March 2017, only 12% of PyPI downloads were initiated by Python3. As an avid user of Python3 this anti-Python3 attitude continues to baffle me. Hell, even Flask now recommends using Python3. It's been quite

AWS

A simple Python3 Lambda function on AWS with an API Gateway

As will be apparent from my previous post I've been playing around with AWS's Lambda service. I'm loving these 'serverless' offerings - they make simple sites just so cheap and easy to host and you don't have to be worried

Python

Getting Lambda to run Python3 scripts with dependencies

I'm currently rebuilding my Dad's website with the intent of adding an order form so he can sell his wine (it's not live yet though). I've taken the opportunity to try and get my head around VueJS which is currently holding up

Python

Choosing a stack

I've been in a lot of discussions lately about 'stacks'. Agencies, for good reason, want to limit the stacks they use and for good reason. It means that projects are more predictable to work on and one can develop templates etc to move things in the

My Favourite Atom Packages

I've been using Atom.io for quite a while now - it's definitely my text editor of choice these days. I was just setting up a new computer and installing all my favourite packages. I thought I might post it here for those interested. So in

Django

Django's getting old

I've been playing around with Django for years. Back when I was a PHP developer that was learning Python it was great. It works the way you expect an MVC framework to work so if you're coming from another language with similar frameworks it's

Centrelink

Centrelink Crisis

I feel like this latest Centrelink debacle is symptomatic of a few things. The first and most significant is a callous government desperately trying to claw back the budget in any way it can and the aggressive pursuit of disempowered people is a favourite of conservative governments the world over.

Cuba

Cuba

With the passing of Comandante Fidel I thought it might be an appropriate time to publish a blog post I wrote about the time I spent in Cuba earlier in the year for mine and Ariane's Long Way Home blog. It's a long and rambling one,

Wagtail

ManyToMany Relationships in Wagtail

I'm loving Wagtail so far. There does seem to be one catch though. It doesn't handle ManyToMany relationships particularly well in the admin. In Wagtail's defence, the problem is caused by Model Cluster which Wagtail relies heavily on itself. I am in the position

Django

Wagtail

So there I was, moaning about the current state of CSMs when I attended the Django mini-conf before PyConAu an saw Adam Brenecki's presentation: Comparing Wagtail, Django CMS and Mezzanine. For whatever reason Wagtail really appealed to me. It had a really nice interface and seemed to do

me

Glasses

I hate buying shoes. They're a fashion statement. They lock you into a 'look'. I don't feel like I have a look but when you buy a pair of shoes you need to make a decision about what sort of 'look' you