Well, it’s done. My first ever Trail Run.

This was an interesting challenge. The thing I hate most when running is elevation. I’m rubbish with hills, and this had plenty of them, not to mention the mud making downhill sections especially slippery and tricky.

For some reason my elbow hurts. Everything else feels fine.

2025 Hadleigh (London 2012 Olympics Legacy) 10k Trail Run

Distance

10.23

Chip Time

01:00:51

Gun Time

01:01:12

Watch Time

59:44

Pace

6:01/km

View Results

This is a syndication of my post on the ComplyAdvantage Technology Blog (Check it out and give my colleagues some love!). At the time of writing, I am working at ComplyAdvantage as a Principal Software Engineer.

This is an annotated version of a session presented at the virtual track of the Distributed SQL Summit 2024, Tuesday 12th November 2024. It covers some (of the many) lessons we learned while building a new platform over the last 18 months using the Distributed SQL database (YugabyteDB).

You can watch the session, or if you prefer read through the annotated slides in this post which contain a transcript of the session.

My first 10k road race.

A great year to start with it being the 40th Anniversary of the Southend 10k.

In the past I didn’t much enjoy “longer middle distances”, but the more I do them the more I enjoy them these days!

Southend Classic 10k - 40th Anniversary

Distance

10km

Chip Time

50:17

Gun Time

50:59

Watch Time

50:57

Pace

5:06/km

View Results

The Pico8 fantasy console caught my attention about a year ago. It’s about time to start writing some code for it.

I’ve started a small GitHub repo of sample code that I’ll be occasionally updating.

My first is a re-creation of Coding Train’s Starfield Simulation on the Pico8. This one is a port of p5.js code to Pico8 Lua.

For the last year or so I have been maintaining my CV/Resume as a series of Markdown files stored in git. These files are then combined into a full document and output into html, pdf, docx using pandoc.

I was performing the build and publication of updates to the document manually, but as is typical of a software engineer I wanted something with a bit less friction which didn’t prevent me from making changes due the amount of work involved.

Since getting a CurrentCost CC128 “smart” electricity meter a few weeks ago the hacker in me has had a resurgence and I have started writing hobby-code again on top of my day job. There seems to be a small industry of software for interacting with these smart meters, and publishing and recording the data to various sources such as Pachube that allow you to share your electricity consumption data with others. At the consumer/home level things seem to still be targeting tinkerer’s like myself, rather than the general consumer. Most of the tools seem to be centered around the linux and java community, which is all well and good, but why can’t us Microsoft .Net folks get in on some of the action.

If you are a software engineer then most likely you subscribe to a number of email lists, or get regular daily / periodical email updates that can clog up your email inbox. Also most likely you use Outlook, connected via POP to download your email, and have a myriad of rules that move messages into folders to keep everything as organized as possible.

On Saturday morning I was lucky enough to spend some time walking around Priory Park, in Southend with my camera and tripod in tow. I only had an hour, and didn’t get to explore even close to half of the park so I will have to take a trip back there this spring and this time allow more time for the visit.