Stories as footprints
Stories are the most valuable footprints left by others in the sands of time. This is a space where I trace those footprints and leave my own. I hope you find them of some value.
Content here falls into three main categories: finds — summaries or reviews of stories and books I've discovered; blog — essays and thoughts on storytelling and other topics; and tech — posts on programming, development, open source, and community.
You can learn more about me here.
Featured Posts
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The Faceless Men of Braavos are assassins who wear the identities of the dead. But the game of faces they use to train may also be a metaphor for what it takes to become a storyteller.
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I opened a Django feature proposal to add AddConstraintConcurrently and RemoveConstraintConcurrently — a pair of opt-in contrib.postgres operations for creating and dropping unique indexes backed by UniqueConstraint without locking database writes.
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How to safely migrate a Django unique constraint to be case-insensitive in production, handling duplicates and avoiding database locks
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WeasyPrint enables PDF generation using the familiar HTML and CSS, but global pagination and layout can lead to severe performance degradation for large, structured documents. Learn why this happens and how restructuring reduced PDF build time by 94%.
Recent Finds
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Ode to Melancholy
Ode to Melancholy, a poem by John Keats, explores the inevitable relationship between melancholy, beauty and joy.
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Ikiru
Kurosawa's Ikiru follows Kanji Watanabe, a lifelong bureaucrat who learns he has a fatal illness. Stunned into realising he has never truly lived, he embarks on a final, desperate quest for meaning.
