Notes from building things.

2026

1. EventStore: One Ordered Log for Everything new 13 Oct

   Event logs · One index, one writer, and the exact delivery guarantee you get.

2. Cats-Actors 2.2.0: Taking Control of Time 1 Sep

   Actors · Part 4 of 4 · Testing timers and timeouts without sleeps, using a clock you control.

3. Cats-Actors 2.1.0 Goes Cross-Platform 3 Apr

   Actors · Part 3 of 4 · One actor codebase on the JVM, as a native binary, and in the browser.

2024

1. Typed Actors in Action - Exploring Cats-Actors with Alice and Bob 27 Jun

   Actors · Part 2 of 4 · Typed actors in Cats-Actors 2.0, through Alice and Bob's wallet transfers.

2. A Logic Circuit Simulator with Cats-Actors 14 Jun

   Actors · Part 1 of 4 · A logic circuit simulator where every gate is an actor.

2021

1. Functional Programming to the max 6 Sep

   Functional programming · A small procedural program, made functional one step at a time.

2019

1. Node Management in GKE 28 Jun

   Infrastructure · How our GKE node pools recover from crashes on their own.

2. Performant Functional Programming to the max with ZIO 18 May

   Functional programming · Rebuilding ACME's order summary with ZIO, pure and fast.

3. Why Kubernetes? Google Cloud Event Follow-up 19 Apr

   Infrastructure · Why we moved to Kubernetes, from my talk at Google Cloud Event Malta.

4. Computation Context - Walk the Line 3 Feb

   Functional programming · Why FP is more than a refactor: effects as computation contexts.

2018

1. Lambda Calculus is Dead! Long live Lambda Calculus! 5 Mar

   Functional programming · Numbers, booleans and recursion from nothing but functions.

2017

1. An efficient headless CMS on top of Wordpress - a.k.a the ACF Compiler! 13 Dec

   Web · Making ACF and WordPress fast enough to be a headless CMS.

2. Akka Finite State Machine (FSM) and At Most Once Semantics 24 Jun

   Actors · Modelling actor behaviour with Akka FSM, and delivering at most once.

3. Angular 2 - Define Routes Dynamically using UIRouter 4 Apr

   Web · Defining Angular routes at runtime with UIRouter.

2016

1. Crawling the Web using Actors 11 Dec

   Actors · A web crawler built from Akka actors, one task at a time.

2. Functions as Data 19 Oct

   Functional programming · A set library where every set is just a function.

3. Decision Trees with Kotlin 20 Aug

   Machine learning · Learning "Play Tennis" with a decision tree written in Kotlin.

4. TypeScript Json Mapper 5 Jun

   Web · Mapping JSON onto typed TypeScript classes.

5. Controlling Digests in AngularJS 14 May

   Web · Finding and fixing AngularJS digest bottlenecks in a big ng-repeat.

6. Language Detection using N-Grams - Part II 9 Apr

   Machine learning · Part 2 of 2 · Building language profiles from real text, and scoring sentences against them.

7. Language Detection using N-Grams 26 Mar

   Machine learning · Part 1 of 2 · How n-gram profiles tell which language a sentence is in.

8. Dockerise, Deploy, Update Code, Repeat 6 Mar

   Infrastructure · A Spring Boot Hello World, packaged with Docker and deployed on Kubernetes.

9. The Three Little Modules and the slick Universal Loader 14 Feb

   Web · Three JavaScript module formats, and one loader that handles them all.

10. Slack! Hubot! Github! 30 Jan

    Web · Set up Slack and Hubot so a chat bot can talk to GitHub.

11. Houses, Arrays and Higher Order Functions 16 Jan

    Functional programming · Mapping, filtering and reducing a street of houses with higher order functions.

12. Higher Order Functions in Practice 5 Jan

    Functional programming · What a higher order function is, shown in JavaScript.

13. Data Abstraction and Closures 2 Jan

    Functional programming · SICP's picture language in JavaScript, to show data abstraction with closures.