Software History

I am presently writing this blog post in a train, with my large suitcase by my side encroaching on the leg room available to me (indeed, as if I hadn't spent enough time with little leg room on seats after flying). Conversations are happening in the background. I have my headphones in, listening to a song by Leah Kate that was recommended by Spotify. It's not the best song, but I'm happy. I was able to play piano for an hour or so at the train station while I waited, something about which I have been thinking for at least a week.

My favourite category of television show is 90s sitcoms. I greatly enjoy Frasier and Seinfeld. I have watched both series many times, although on many occasions I have had the show on in the background before I go to sleep. I enjoy going to sleep after watching something funny. I remember reading an article in The Atlantic at the beginning of the pandemic that spoke about the comfort of watching shows you have already seen before. This idea just came to mind again.

The templates used to generate prompts for my GPT 3.5-powered chatbot are versioned in a custom-made system. This was a requirement for the project that came to mind after I made the initial logic to query sources and return a result that makes reference to the sources. I decided that all prompts should be saved separately from my application code to ensure that I didn't overwrite them in testing and lose the history of the prompts with which I have been working.

As I write, Taylor Swift music is flowing through my ears, a mesmerising acoustic rendition of Epiphany. The weather has been warm of late. I saw an ensemble of small birds flying in the same area yesterday evening. The birds were so swift that I was unable to ascertain the colours on some of them. And now I find myself thinking about all of the words I have noted down in the last few days, realising it is time for another edition of Fun with Words.

I asked Jacob for how long he is staying in San Francisco. He responds

The postie arrived about an hour ago and delivered my new coffee beans from Artisan Roast. I've already brewed up a cup. They are honey-processed which is what made me choose them over all the other beans on the market.

Based in Glasgow's Southside, It All Started Here serves coffee from a rotating selection of roasters as well as cakes and other treats baked in-house. In this interview, I chat with the owner of It All Started Here, William, about his inspiration behind starting the cafe, the Glasgow speciality coffee scene, and more. I hope you enjoy the interview.

I have enjoyed every coffee I have tried from Steampunk Coffee, a roastery based in North Berwick, Scotland. Their positive reputation with me was the reason I decided to order my first ever decaf coffee from their roastery. I wanted to get the best impression of decaf coffee as I could. I did not want a bad decaf bean to cause me to develop ill-informed opinions on decaf coffee.

Artisan Roast has been on my radar for a number of months. They have a quirky website that features a GIF of someone slurping coffee directly from a glass jug. Their packaging looks aesthetically pleasing. They have a reputation for offering high-quality coffees.

I was told that I was arguably having my first

I have asked a few people lately when they drink coffee. I am interested in this because I understand that we all drink coffee at different times, in different quantities, and in different contexts. I want to learn more about how others consume coffee. To keep the discussion going, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my personal coffee routine. This routine has stayed roughly the same over the last few months as I work from home. The major changes have been the equipment I use to brew, from brewer changes to, more recently, the purchase of a new grinder.

Just over a month ago, I posted a blog post about my first brew with the Aromaboy coffee brewer, a delightfully retro coffee brewer made by Melitta. The retro appeal was a large factor in my decision to purchase the brewer but I was also fascinated by making coffee with a machine. I only brewed coffee by hand at home before purchasing the Aromaboy so I was curious about what the process of brewing coffee with a machine was like. I wanted to take some time to reflect on my use of this brewer and why I have enjoyed using the Aromaboy so much.

Argyll Coffee Roasters is a one-person operation based in Tighnabruaich, Argyll, Scotland. Argyll Coffee offers a range of seasonally-rotating single origin coffees and two blends to their customers, who live all across Scotland. I wanted to learn more about Argyll Coffee so I reached out to the founder Eve. We spoke briefly over email about Argyll Coffee, how Eve decides the way in which a coffee is roasted, and more. Read the interview below.

I see websites in two categories: dynamic and static. I had a dynamic website earlier this year. Maintaining it took a lot of work. The one factor that made me hesitant to move to a static website was that I had a few features that relied on my site being dynamic. I had a grid which showed the days on which I had and had not written a blog post. I did not make that grid on this site because, at the time, I did not think it was possible.

The Manchester Coffee Archive caught my attention as soon as I found out about the project. The Archive freezes samples of roasted coffee to preserve them for later use. Before the pandemic, the Archive hosted tastings of coffee from different years. In this interview, Tom, an archivist, notes that he is drinking a coffee from December 2019.

Credit: Lance Aikman Green

I used to think dictionaries were just a list of words. In school, I rarely referred to a physical dictionary. Online dictionaries were much easier to access. Reading The Great Passage, a work of fiction by Shion Miura, made me realise how much work goes into maintaining physical dictionaries and, to a greater extent, the responsibilities involved in writing definitions for a word.

Coffee is a fruit. Most of the coffee in production today—around 70 percent or more—is cultivated from the coffea arabica species of plant. This plant is commonly known as Arabica. Grown between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, the coffee plant grows cherries that contain seeds.

A few weeks ago, I posted a question on Instagram: where can I get a speciality Robusta coffee? I received no direction as to where I could get some speciality Robusta coffee, perhaps with good reason because speciality Robusta is not nearly as easy to get as speciality Arabica coffee. Things changed when I had a conversation last week which led to me getting my hands on a small sample of speciality Robusta coffee, graded by a professional.

I sat down studiously reading the newspaper, engaged in the news of the day (and, on a side note pondering on how a large, notable news story announced yesterday must have happened after the presses started printing). With a keen eye for words, I proactively took notes, as I often do, of exciting words. That, combined with my other readings over the last week, is the origin of this week's edition of Fun with Words.

Matthias Ott's recent article on writing caught my attention:

Perhaps only I could be listening to a podcast introduction and think, as the sun is rising,

When I am traveling places, I don’t like to take my computer unless necessary. If I take my computer, it would be too easy to jump back into a programming project on which I am working or dive into a rabbit hole from which I emerge hours later.

I write a lot of technical documentation, which involves using long(er) words like

In parts one and two of this series, we built a program to monitor the moisture level in a plant and a program to convert our readings into a chart. The final step is to create a web page that lets us see our chart and download our logging file. That's what we are going to cover in this tutorial. If you have not already read parts one and two, I'd recommend doing that before continuing. You can find links to these tutorials at the end of this post. Without any further ado, let's get started.

As you might know, Google weighs various factors when ranking a web page to certain extents. Factors like whether a keyword is in a title are a strong indicator that the article is likely to be relevant to a target keyword. Thus, that article will be considered more relevant than, say, an article that only mentions the keyword once or twice. I will leave the exact logic behind Google to people who know more about this topic than I.

I attended my first Beyond Tellerrand conference in Berlin last week. I'll not bury the lede and go right out and say that I definitely want to attend another Beyond Tellerrand. The event was such an excellent experience, featuring inspiring and thought-provoking talks as well as an excellent community with whom I chatted about everything from technology to data to anything else that came to mind.

A couple of months ago, I started to work on my own webmention receiver. Instead of relying on webmention.io, a service commonly used to receive webmentions, I wanted to challenge myself to create a receiver from scratch. To do so, I realised I would have to read, understand, and interpret a W3C specification, something I had not done up until the point of deciding to work on a webmention receiver. While I knew there would be challenges, I wanted to take control over how I received webmentions and build my own service.

When was the last time you wrote a physical letter, with handwriting? I cannot accurately answer this question for myself. Part of me wants to believe that I have written a letter by hand and sent it to someone. However, I cannot think of a single occasion where this is true. Perhaps when I used to enter into magazine competitions when I was a kid, although that was not a full letter so much as filling out a form to enter a competition.

For the last few days, the server on which this website (and many others I run!) started acting strangely. Every so often, nginx would stop working and I'd have to restart the service manually. I had restarted nginx two or three times over the last few days so I knew something wasn't right. I spent some time this afternoon figuring out what was wrong. I found an issue with certbot renewals and nginx that, when resolved, fixed the errors I found in nginx and the /var/log/syslog file on my computer.