Stig's Soapbox
This is a personal blog. Opinions expressed here do not reflect those of my employer.
Most recent articles
I also maintain a full list of articles, and an RSS feed.
- Shell Quickstart Tutorial Shell
In 2013 I worked at NET-A-PORTER, where we ran a year-long graduate program. Participants did three-month rotations with four teams, getting experience with different parts of our business. I volunteered to run a workshop introducing them to shell programming, and later adapted the material into this blog post.
- How I record Guitar Music
In my musical journey I try to record myself occasionally to track my progress, and be able to critically listen to myself so I can fix my mistakes. This is brief note on how I normally do that.
- On broken horses & master branches Soapbox
I explain why I chose to rename the
master
branch in my Git repos totrunk
.
Favourite articles
These are my three all-time favourite articles.
- My hiring experience as a submarine sonar operator in the Norwegian Navy Talks Hiring
This is a transcript of a lightning talk I gave at a company "all hands" get-together. I tell the story of my "hiring experience" as a sonar operator on a submarine in the Norwegian Navy. To tie it into work, I included a little hiring-related lesson at the end.
My first to reach the HackerNews front page. In weeks it got orders of magnitude more hits than the rest of my site put together.
- Potter Coding Dojo in Clojure Clojure
Detailing my trials and tribulations with the "Potter" coding dojo problem, with code examples in Clojure.
I like it because of the amount of iterations I went through, and the discussions I had with coworkers about it at all-hands.
- Rise of the Machine Hacks
I ruminate on implementing a simple virtual machine—for a simple language—in C.
I like this one because it was such a great learning experience!
Publications Elsewhere
This is a list of some of my talks & articles hosted elsewhere:
- My NET-A-PORTER TECHNICAL BLOG entries (2013–2014)
These are my contributions to the NET-A-PORTER TECHNICAL BLOG. Including, but not limited to, a shell & regexp primer, maximising cache hit rates for REST APIs, and Akka musings.
The original site is no longer online, but the WayBackMachine remembers.
- Delighting your users with SBJson 4 (2013) SpeakerDeck
This is my first Pecha Kucha style talk, made at NSLondon meetup. The sound is not great, and one of my slides is a bit misleading. Nevertheless I have a special fondness for this one. It was the first time someone I didn't know contacted me to ask me to give a talk.
The video is no longer online, so I've linked to the slides instead.
- Overcoming U-turns and Dead Ends: Lessons of using Scala, Akka & Spray on Heroku (2013)
I presented this "experience talk" at Scala eXchange 2013 with Sam Dean. (I'm afraid you have to log in to view the video.) It's a mish-mash of stuff we learnt while building the backend of The Netbook—NET-A-PORTER's social network offering.
- Testing C with Libtap (2006)
I gave a talk at YAPC::NA 2005 on this topic, and a member of the audience approached me to write it up as an article for ONLamp magazine. This was the result.
Sadly it is no longer online at the original URL, but the WayBackMachine has my back!
- Creating HTML with M4 (2002)
A long, long time ago I used
make
andcpp
to maintain my website. Later I upgraded tom4
. I wrote an article on the subject, and Linux Magazine published it.