10 Mei, 2026
08 May 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos] Veteran super-coder Jez is back, and claims he has “finished” implementing Cell, Andy’s toy language, in Rust. Jez and Andy basically gossip a…
January 24, 2019 [Programming, Programming Languages, Python, Tech] It was a pleasure to attend the London Python Meetup organized by @python_london. There were lots of friendly people and interesting conversation.…
May 05, 2026 [Tech] I really enjoy reimplementing things that already exist. Sometimes it’s just out of necessity, sometimes it’s to make it faster, or work in a different way,…
04 February 2019 [Java, Performance, Programming, Rabbit Escape] Series: operation, image, opacity I wanted to overhaul the UI of my desktop game Rabbit Escape to make it more comfortable and…
May 01, 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos] Let’s fix the messy error handling in our Rust towncrier clone using anyhow library and add context() call to explain what went wrong.…

Jez is back for a programming language chat!

08 May 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos] Veteran super-coder Jez is back, and claims he has “finished” implementing Cell, Andy’s toy language, in Rust. Jez and Andy basically gossip a bit, about code types. Read Jez’s blog at Read my blog at Follow Jez on mastodon: @jezhiggins@mastodon.me.uk Follow me on mastodon: @andybalaam@mastodon.social PakarPBN A Private […]

1 min read

London Python Meetup January 2019 – Async Python and GeoPandas

January 24, 2019 [Programming, Programming Languages, Python, Tech] It was a pleasure to attend the London Python Meetup organized by @python_london. There were lots of friendly people and interesting conversation. I gave the talk “Making 100 million requests with Python aiohttp” (slides, Blog post) explaining the basics of writing async code in Python 3 and […]

2 mins read

Announcing Changelog Builder – a towncrier clone for creating changelogs

May 05, 2026 [Tech] I really enjoy reimplementing things that already exist. Sometimes it’s just out of necessity, sometimes it’s to make it faster, or work in a different way, or improve the quality of the code, but I like having concrete expectations about how the code functions. So, when a colleague suggested we use […]

2 mins read

Performance of Java 2D drawing operations (part 1: types of operations)

04 February 2019 [Java, Performance, Programming, Rabbit Escape] Series: operation, image, opacity I wanted to overhaul the UI of my desktop game Rabbit Escape to make it more comfortable and look nicer, so I looked at a new look at game-loop style graphics rendered to the canvas in a Java 2D (Swing) UI. For more […]

10 mins read

Using any means to handle errors in my Rust changelog generator

May 01, 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos] Let’s fix the messy error handling in our Rust towncrier clone using anyhow library and add context() call to explain what went wrong. Can we match the output of towncrier under different circumstances? Do we really want to match it, or can we do better? You can find […]

1 min read

Performance of Java 2D drawing operations (part 2: drawing)

08 February 2019 [Java, Performance, Programming, Rabbit Escape] Series: operation, image, opacity In my previous post I examined the performance of various drawing operations in Java 2D rendering. Here I looked at some specifics around image rendering, with the goal of finding optimizations I could apply to my game Rabbit Escape. You can find the […]

5 mins read

A simpler blog commenting system

April 26, 2026 [Tech] Since I created this blog statically using Zola, I have been using Remark42 as my commenting system. I wanted something self-hosted and simple, and it worked. I currently get comments every few months, and about half of them are spam. Remark42 seems to forget who I am every time, so deleting […]

2 mins read

Building a Rust command line tool: towncrier clone

April 24, 2026 [Programming, Rust, Tech, Videos] Enthusiastically embracing test-driven development as usual, we attempted to write a minimal clone of a useful tool, towncrier, that allows us to create changelogs from individual “news fragment” files. In the end we had the outline of a viable solution that passed the first and only test! You […]

1 min read

Performance of Java 2D drawing operations (part 3: image opacity)

February 11, 2019 [Java, Performance, Programming] Series: operation, image, opacity Not because I enjoyed it, I seemed compelled to continue my quest to understand the performance of various Java 2D drawing operations. I’m hoping to make my game Rabbit Escape faster, especially on the Raspberry Pi, so you might see another post sometime actually trying […]

3 mins read

Keybase chat bot in 10 lines of bash

February 14, 2019 [bash, JSON, Keybase, Programming] I’ve become very interested in keybase.io lately, mainly because it offers secure conversations, and you can have bots. I wrote a quick bot to simulate Arnold Schwarzenegger that I thought I’d share to show how easy it is. It’s based on the keybase command line tool (which comes […]

2 mins read