Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 Lens

The Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 lens was manufactured by Asahi (now Pentax) in the 1960s for SLRs cameras. Fast forward sixty years and this lens is now regarded for its character. Shot wide open at f/1.4 it provides a smooth background blur and subtle vignette swirl. Combined with the golden tint these lenses have developed from a thorium coating produces photographs like no other.


Grokking Simplicity

Grokking Simplicity: Taming Complex Software with Functional Thinking by Eric Normand teaches functional patterns and abstractions that we as developers can use to write good code. Throw away the Haskell-on-a-chalkboard imagery; this isn’t like most functional programming (FP) books. The FP topics covered in this book are practical and will improve your every day code. No monads or applicatives here, instead you’ll learn concepts you can apply in any programming language and …


Lines Left Upon a Seat In a Yew Tree - Wordsworth

June 26 2021 · poems wordsworth

William Wordsworth. From Lyrical Ballads (1798)

Nay, Traveller! rest. This lonely yew-tree stands
Far from all human dwelling: what if here
No sparkling rivulet spread the verdant herb;
What if these barren boughs the bee not loves;
Yet, if the wind breathe soft, the curling waves,
That break against the shore, shall lull thy mind
By one soft impulse saved from vacancy.

Who he was
That piled these stones, and with the mossy sod
First covered o’er, and taught this aged tree,
Now wild, to …


Zero-cost Deployments

Deploying code into production costs engineering teams. It’s not the dollar amount we care about but the time and attention engineers have to spend on the deployment. Projects with a complex release process, slow pipelines, or flakey steps are expensive to deploy. This cost feeds back into how we work and has detrimental effects on how we write code, work as a team, and run systems as professionals.

A Zero-cost Deployment is completely automated. Engineers are confident in the correctness …


Rob Roy Glacier

Driving up the Matukituki Valley

Driving up the Matukituki Valley

The only Kea on the walk

The only Kea on the walk