the tools I use to record the chaos in my brain

Recently at work I had the need to build a small ETL (Export, Transform, Load) process to move some data from PostgreSQL database A (a primary relational database used by our application to serve customer traffic) to PostgreSQL database B (a back-of-house instance used to perform metering and other usage analytics). We already use Apache Airflow to orchestrate the metering tasks, data sync and Stripe API interactions, so building this process in Airflow was my first choice.

I recently had the chance to join Guy Podjarny of Snyk to record an episode of The Secure Developer podcast. We spoke about my time at Intercom and my winding journey into security engineering starting from the product side. You can find a link to the recording and a full transcript of the episode.

Last year I started making a more deliberate effort to make digital memories of everyday life in the form of audio recordings, photos, and video. While I’ve long been a fan of taking a camera with me on trips, the months-long absences of any photos in my Lightroom library made me realize how much every day life I was neglecting to record. As a byproduct of this new habit I’ve ended up with a bunch of material documenting in greater detail the electronics and musics side projects that have occupied more and more of my time since 2019.

Web content accessibility has been on my mind recently as I watched one of the other engineering teams at Intercom in San Francisco undertake to make the Intercom Messenger accessible and compliant with the Web Content Accessiblity Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 Level AA. Despite the continued growth and evolution of the internet it has yet to really live up to its true potential as universally accessible communication, and the accessibility landscape of online content is no exception.

This is an extension of my last post: A brief musical journey, as well as a number of stories which I’ve been posting on Instagram in recent days. As part of my of my adventures in the world of producing elecronic music I came across the fascinating world of modular synthesis. Modular synthesizers are composable musical instruments which are built up of many discrete modules, almost like the Lego bricks of synthesizers.

I’m back! It’s been a while but I’ve decided to dust off my old blog and to start trying to write some more regular updates as to what I’ve been doing these last 18 months. For those of you who I’ve not seen in a while it’s been a busy time. One of the primary things I’ve been spending time at recently has been all things music, in particular both learning to create and attending more live electronic music.

This weekend I took the opportunity of some downtime and the fact that I’ve deployed a new primary VPS (with the wonderful iocoop) to migrate my blog source to use hugo, leaving behind the Octopress setup I’ve had for a while. Why? Well I’ve been on a small Go kick recently at $DAYJOB and elsewhere and having played with some of the other utilities developed by spf13 such as cobra and admiring their ergonomics and simplicity I was keen to give hugo a try.

Administrating a single server that’s your sole responsibility isn’t that much of a hassle but anyone who’s shared this responsibility with others or inherited machines manually configured by others knows without documentation will quickly tell you it’s a pain to work backwards from the finished server and maintain it going forward. Getting bitten by this once or twice is OK, but as I get more involved in certain projects it’s becoming a stronger anti-pattern, and so I’m making a pledge to stop it.

I’ve lapsed yet again in the weekly writing requirement of the Iron Blogger project at Noisebridge and so feel compelled to give a core-dump type post to recount the happenings of the last two weeks. I made a real breakthrough in my running in the last two weeks, after picking out some advice from /r/running on Reddit. I was absentmindedly browsing looking for training plans when I came upon a “beginners guide” of sorts which I scrolled though.