Decentralised Finance (DeFi) has crept into a couple of my go-to podcasts; folks I respect are talking about it so I wanted to learn it for myself. In this post I describe the approach I took to learning the Terra Blockchain. We set aside GUIs and Web Applications and instead interact with it programatically through the Python API.

What is DeFi? I’m not an expert and I’m not a Twitter shill so I can’t …

An extract from Monsieur - Or the Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell. Part of The Avignon Quintet .

In those days there were no real suburbs - the desert began almost at the gates of Alexandria and with it of course the damp enervating heat which soaked and bathed one, until one could feel the sweat trickling through one’s clothes into one’s very saddle. Our breathing was laboured. There were small villages giving (so many were the mirages) the illusion of being fictions; their …

Update 2022-01: Check out library Fli .

Synchronously execute a process and wait for it to return; capturing the exit code, stdout, and stderr. It’s a snippet that I often reach for but I can never find it on the internet. Dotnet makes it more difficult than it really should be.

let result = executeProcess "uptime" "-p"

printfn "Exit code: %d" result.ExitCode
printfn "StdOut: %s" result.StdOut

(*
  Exit code: 0
  StdOut: up 2 days, 20 hours, 55 minutes
*) …

New Zealand and Australia have had a long-standing arrangement where citizens can just hop on the plane and travel to the other country to holiday, live indefinitely, and work. No need for paperwork or rubber-stamped approvals beforehand. Assuming the individual has no criminal record and is free of consumption, as soon as they arrive in the country they are issued with a special visa and away they go.

Much like the events affected by COVID-19 (who knew there were so few), travel between …