Posts, page 2 of 6

Friday, 7th February 2025

I had two exciting days at State of Open Con 2025. I had the honour of volunteering an afternoon shift on day 1 and a morning shift of day 2. I was lucky enough to help out in rooms both days, so as well as running around with microphones, counting people and making things ran smoothly and to time, I got to listen to more talks than I'd hoped for. Thank you volunteering scheduling gods!

Here's a few things that stood out to me:

  • There's a growing sovereignty risk for European countries heavy reliance on US cloud providers. European cloud providers market share continues to go down. EU want to reverse this trend, with a focus on open source solutions. Interestingly UK Gov has confirmed multi-region cloud is fine.
  • open source suffers from toxic behaviour and drama (see some examples). Some recommendations: have a strong code of conduct in place, be consistent in applying it and transparent in its use.
  • Great security (particularly supply chain) resources and stuff to get involved with at CD.Foundation, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (Cloud Native Landscape is a fun way to realise software is very complicated these days!), OpenSSF's projects provide security tooling and best practices galore (I particularly like the Best Practices project), all of which are particularly helpful in securing your software supply chain, SLSA is about verifying provenance. And not forgetting OWASP's projects.
  • People like Lord Nat Wei are pushing for open government "finish what the internet and open source started by open sourcing politics and government"
  • In the global south, understanding of open-source development model is limited, accustomed to traditional vendor relationships providing software, and cloud deployments are rare for production (partly because the well-known cloud vendors don't have data centres in many global south countries)

Here's some recent laws I learnt about:


Sunday, 26th January 2025

Job hunting

  • On Monday, I applied for a principal developer role at a non-ministerial government department. I wonder how there not being a minister changes things.
  • I've applied for 4 jobs on Tuesday, all engineering manager roles.
  • I also emailed Cabinet Office's Test, Learn and Grow programme, showing interest in getting involved.

Wednesday

  • I met up with my sisters in Brighton. We had breakfast and talked about growing old and associated ailments and how the wait to find out about diagnoses of possibly major health issues (the not knowing stage) can be a horribly, anxious time.
  • Read the opening pages of Three Body Problem

Thursday

  • Met my fellow State of Open Con 2025 volunteers, picked up a t-shirt and had a walk around the venue. Went for a pint with a few of the volunteers afterwards.

Listens

  • Been listening to Mano Le Tough this week in the gym. Spotify told me he's playing in Brixton soon. Starts at 10pm! I'm going to bed by then.

Notable reads

  • I flicked through the UNIX-HATERS Handbook. I looked up a few of the authors to see what they're doing now. Steve Strassmann has a collections of essays called Artificial Trust on AI and understanding complex systems, and all very readable. Simson Garfinkel writes a newsletter called Database Nation on data, ethics and AI.
  • There's been a lot of chatter about the UK Government's Test, Learn and Grow programme on the interweb. I've registered my interested in getting involved but I think it might be quite a while before they get to making any software. I read State of digital government report. Lots of positives, recognising many of the systemic challenges in delivery I recognise from my time at MoJ. Here's two highlights of many that caught my eye:

Mandate the publication of a standard set of APIs and events by public sector organisations. Starting with an expectation that every new service in central government departments will have an open API.

and:

Expand use of performance-based, outcomes-focused funding models that tie funding to metrics and accelerate the shift from ‘boom and bust’ transformation programmes to continuous funding of persistent, multidisciplinary product teams.

I hope some of it becomes true.


Thursday, 23rd January 2025

I've set up garden.rowlando.dev to publish some of the notes I make in Obsidian. Thank you to Wanderloots for making a concise, informative video to guide me through the Obsidian Digital Garden plug-in.

Behind the scenes the plug-in uses Eleventy, the static site generator I use for this website. The plug-in publishes to GitHub, Netlify kicks off a build process and then deploys the website.

This is all for free. The only thing I pay for is £10 a year my domain name.


Confirmation bias is the essential engine of AI training. The weight given to an outcome that deems it “most likely” doesn’t come from reason, but confirmation bias.

AIs with confirmation bias are also notoriously opaque - decisions are made quickly and confidently, but never justified. The closest you might get to an explanation is a vague indication that some input resembles past inputs. This is of course how prejudice and intolerance work: the only explanation is “everyone just knows this is true.”

Steve Strassmann



Monday, 14th October 2024

What distinguishes software architecture from coding and design? Many things, including the role that architects have in defining architectural characteristics, the important aspects of the system independent of the problem domain. Many organizations describe these features of software with a variety of terms, including nonfunctional requirements, but we dislike that term because it is self-denigrating. Architects created that term to distinguish architecture characteristics from functional requirements, but naming something nonfunctional has a negative impact from a language standpoint: how can teams be convinced to pay enough attention to something “nonfunctional”? Another popular term is quality attributes, which we dislike because it implies after-the-fact quality assessment rather than design. We prefer architecture characteristics because it describes concerns critical to the success of the architecture, and therefore the system as a whole, without discounting its importance.

An architecture characteristic meets three criteria:

  • Specifies a nondomain design consideration
  • Influences some structural aspect of the design
  • Is critical or important to application success

Source: Mark Richards and Neal Ford. Software Architecture 2024 V2 . Kindle Edition.

Neal Ford and Mark Richards


Sunday, 8th September 2024

Short update, better than nothing though.

Wednesday to Friday

Sleep was not great this week. 2am wake ups and not falling back to sleep until 6ish, often referred to as middle-of-the-night insomnia. Work didn't happen on Wednesday but resumed on Thursday and Friday.

Listening

Lex Friedman's podcast episodes are long! Still haven't completed the Pieter Levels episode. I love his tool selection - jQuery, PHP, SQLite - for building is start ups, very much in line with choose boring tech that I'm a big believer in.


Sunday, 1st September 2024

Work

I suggested Show The Thing format at work as a replacement of the drier financial updates. I went first with showing the legacy point-of-sale system I am integrating with as part of my work with Openr. Two other colleagues showed a thing as well. I think this format suits a consultancy quite well.

Saturday

🏃‍♂️‍➡️ We visited K's godfather. Took the opportunity to try Squerryes Winery Parkrun. Loved running through the vineyard. Would like to return to the taproom.

Sunday

The boy ran junior Parkrun in additional to Saturday's 5k. He's determined to get a fast time. His mate comes first every week, at around 7 mins 30 seconds.

🌻 I am going to grow spinach over autumn and winter. I finished off preparing the right-hand side raised bed by removing as many weeds and wood chips as I could, improving the top layer of soil by digging in soil improver in the form of farmyard manure. Then I planted three rows of spinach 'Gigante d'Inverno' seeds spaced 30cm apart. In a few weeks time, I'll sow again so I spinach is growing through to the winter.

📺 The boy and I watched Instant Family which is about the emotional journey through fostering and adoption, followed by Ninja Warrior Juniors USA final!

🎧 Listens

Whilst listening to another podcast about the rise of SQLite, the guest talked about aphantasia which is a condition that prevents individuals from visualising images in their minds. After doing a brief, not very scientific test on myself, this is something I probably have to some degree. I definitely can't summon images into my mind. I didn't realise this was even a thing.

I gave the latest Nick Cave album a listen. What stood out most was the use of a gospel-ish backing singers and Colin Greenwood on bass!. Very interesting read about Nick Cave's relationship with theology, particularly with Christianity and the references to this in Wild God.

Notable reads

I read another blog post about databases. This time Ethan McCue's Just use Postgres blogpost.

Martin Fowler revised his original post on Strangler Fig, the metaphor to describe a gradual approach to legacy modernisation. We used this lots at MoJ. It's easier said than done but I came to be a believer in that its mostly the only workable method, but takes time, just like nature takes time to do its work.


Tuesday, 27th August 2024

For work I have a mandatory secure development course that includes a web security lab. PortSwigger has a broad array of details topics on web security covering the ones you'd expect but also advanced, newer topics like Web LLM attacks.

One thing I did learn was that, even though I have multi-factor authentication set up for AWS, it's not truly multi-factor. I use a password and a passkey but they both are provided by password manager using my fingerprint. It's very convenient though. Maybe I should continue getting a second factor from my phone's authenticator app, which is slightly more time consuming, but more secure.


Monday, 26th August 2024

Here are a few way I explore CSV files, with DuckDB being a new entrant.

CSVKit

I find myself working with CSV files these days. I sometimes need to look around inside. For 10s of rows, a text editor will do - I just use VS Code. csvlook from csvkit is great too.

The following command will allow me to scroll through the first 500 lines of a file. The --no-inference flag informs csvlook to not infer data type and format values accordingly.

head -n 500 yourfile.csv | csvlook --no-inference | less -S

Sometimes I find myself needing to filter out rows. The following command will filter rows based on the presence of \\N in any of the columns between 1 and 12, and output the inverse (-i) results (good data) to a file.

csvgrep -c 1-12 -m "\\N" -i -a file_with_unwanted_data.csv > file-with_unwanted_rows_removed.csv

SQLite

Sometimes I want to explore the file a bit and csvkit tools becoming a bit unwieldy. SQLlite is perfect for the job. Remember, SQLite is included in macOS and Mac OS X by default, so sqlite-utils will just work once installed.

This command switches to CSV mode and imports the CSV file into a table called prices:

sqlite>.mode csv
sqlite>.import prices.csv prices

Julia Evans mentioned sqlite-utils in her blog post sqlite-utils: a nice way to import data into SQLite for analysis It's another tool from the prolific Simon Willison.

The following command installs sqlite-utils and uses it to create a new databases called prices.db (sqlite is a file-based database) with a table called prices with records inserted into the table from the CSV file:

brew install sqlite-utils

Once installed, you can import with this command:

sqlite-utils insert prices.db prices prices.csv --csv

With large files, Simon notes sqlite-utils can be slower compared to using SQLite directly. You can import JSON and other formats just as easily.

Once you have a SQLite database, use standard SQL to query.

DuckDB

I just listed to a podcast on Software Engineering Daily about DuckDB. The founder, Hannes Mühleisen, makes a claim that the DuckDB team have inadvertently built the worlds best CSV reader.

duckdb -c  "select * from read_csv('prices.csv')"

DuckDB doesn't need to ingest the data into its database engine. There are clients for various programming languages. And you can read from many different data formats beyond CSV. Paul Gross has started to use DuckDB as a replacement for jq.