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
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 helpful. To
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
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
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 about an entire back-end
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 very well
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
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.
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
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
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
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
Shaving So shaving. I hate shaving. I'm a bearded man and that is directly related to just how boring I find shaving. But I work in advertising now. So it's time I started to take at least a little bit of care in my appearance
cycling An update So my compadre (and former podcast co-host) Terry is currently doing a bit of travel around SE Asia and blogging fairly regularly. It has reminded me that I have an unloved blog and how I'd like to write more. The problem is I either
OS X Power Users I recently saw an argument break out on a Python Slack channel I lurk on about the importance of 'power users' and how much attention tech companies should pay to them. It degenerated into an argument about whether or not OSX rebuilt their entire
Islam Islam in Australia I just read the wonderful Celeste Liddle's latest post in which she makes the following point in passing: "even though the Muslim connection to this land mass predates white invasion by up to an estimated 200 years" Not that I doubted her,
Wordpress My Kingdom for a CMS I have a new job. Yay. Seriously, I'm very happy about it. I get a lot of control over the technical direction the company goes which is all a developer can ever ask for. But the first job I've had to do for them
Design Patterns On Learning Design Patterns In my last post I lamented a missed opportunity where I feel I would have learnt a lot - particularly in terms of Design Patterns. To someone like me, a fairly experienced but self taught developer, it's easy to feel like Design Patterns are
NodeJS Knock backs and Becoming a Senior Developer I recently got knocked back for a job that pretty much looked like my dream job. It was a startup with a team of four - two senior devs, a junior and a lead/architect. My interview was with the lead/architect, there was
Python Setting up PostgreSQL and Django on OS X I've been keen to start using PostgreSQL for far too long now. Everyone raves about it and MySQL has lost it's open source cred since being acquired by Oracle. But I was quickly starting to believe that the reason people were raving about it
Django Podcast Feeds in Django I've been talking to Terry Johal about getting our podcast up and running again. Naturally my action plan was to rebuild the website. It was original built in CakePHP but has a few little bugs I've never got around to fixing so I thought
Flask Testing File uploads in Flask I was recently writing Flask integration tests for a form that had a file upload parameter. As it turns out, is isn't as straight forward as I had thought it would be. A basic file upload test might look like this: def test_logo(
My Work Church Street Funding Once again I teamed up with Voist and and the City of Westminster to develop a website for their Arts and Culture Funding Program. The site allows users to register,
