The danger of using models as metaphors

21 March, 2024

A tangram that's not quite put together righ

Of the many fascinating insights to be found in Elinor Ostrom's book Governing the commons there are a few that have really stuck with me. My personally sticky insights aren't really related to the core argument, it's all well out of my wheel house after all. My ears most pricked up when Ostrom wrote about the social responsibilities of scientists and the social impact of social research.


Using Nix to deploy a Haskell web app to Heroku

16 February, 2020

Deploying Ruby on Rails apps to Heroku has always been a delight, and now that they have a container registry other run-times are similarly delightfully deployable. No build-packs required.

with (import <nixpkgs> {});
dockerTools.buildImage {
  name = "hello";
  contents = [ hello ];
}

Home sweet home

12 February, 2020
brad@brad
~ » nix-shell -p figlet
brad@brad [nix:shell]
~ » figlet -f smscript nifty

      o |\_|_
/|/|  | |/ |  |  |
 | |_/|/|_/|_/ \/|/
        |)      (|

If you're like me, you develop on both macOS and Linux and are very much a creature of habit, then this may be of interest. It's a description of how I arrived at my current approach for maintaining a base development environment across the two platforms.


Getting close to the conceptual metal

27 January, 2020

Writing software can give us the ability to take a nearly impossibly abstract idea and use it to create a runnable program.

In this post we're to talk about "fundamental things" and see how much we can build with them.

type a × b =
  forall c.
    (a -> b -> c) -> c

type a + b =
  forall c.
    (a -> c) -> (b -> c) -> c

Deploying a fully automated Nix-based static website

21 November, 2019
{ config, pkgs, ... }:
let
  repo = builtins.fetchTarball {
    url = https://repo.tar.gz;
  };
in
{
  imports = ["${repo}/module.nix"];

  services."site".enable = true;
}

I can't promise that this will take you five minutes (it won't). What I will say is this: if you'd like to learn more about Nix and NixOs then this may be interesting.


Servant's type-level domain specific language

05 October, 2019

Haskell has some very interesting type-level features, Servant is a great case-study in how they can be used to build a practical and feature rich library. This post walks through an example in an attempt to become more familiar with its inner workings.

type UsersIndex =
  Get '[JSON] [User]

type UsersShow =
  Capture "username" String
    :> Get '[JSON] User

type UsersAPI =
  "users"
    :> (UsersIndex :<|> UsersShow)

Let's learn about lenses

21 August, 2018
type Lens s t a b =
  forall f. Functor f =>
    (a -> f b) -> s -> f t

_1 :: Lens (a, c) (b, c) a b
_1 = _

_2 :: Lens (c, a) (c, b) a b
_2 = _

Gaining an understanding of the Lens type has been on my todo list for a long time. So I finally bit the bullet and read up a little. These are (more or less) my notes as I went along.


You already know what Monads are

06 January, 2017

I sought to understand what the fuss was all about and I've now added to the mass of Monad Explainer posts on the internet.

readAFile().then(function (content) {
  return writeAFile(content)
}).then(function (report) {
  console.log(report)
})

Petrichor Ensemble — Gig Poster

08 February, 2013

Petrichor Ensemble — Gig Poster Detail

Petrichor (/ˈpɛtrɨkɔər/) is the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil. The word is constructed from Greek, petra, meaning ‘stone’, + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of the gods in Greek mythology.

Wikpedia

Petrichor Ensemble — Gig Poster Full


Brisbane Bicycle Film Festival 2012 — Poster

03 October, 2012

Bicycle Film Festival — Poster Detail

I don't have the original images anymore, but this made a rad gif also...

Bicycle Film Festival — Poster Full


Design futures — Typography

01 June, 2011

Design Futures — Monogram

Design Futures — Full

Everything is connected, and the way it connects is kinda complex. I'd like to be more aware of my connections to people and the networks they're a part of.

As it stands these are all mock-ups rendered in SketchUp, the ~~dream~~ plan is to get this rendering in the browser from user input. Wild scaffolding.