Ah, giant robots. I grew up thinking they are the coolest things ever, and I still do. My first exposure to them was probably through 1994’s BattleTech animated series, where Adam Steiner piloted an AXM-2N Axman, in its frankly ridiculous neon green and purple paint job. And from there, well. I was hooked. Lets explore a little about some history, some of my favourite giant robot media, and even a small work-related thing.

The Shunn manuscript format is a set of guidelines for writers to follow when submitting manuscripts to publishers. It was created by author William Shunn and is widely used in the publishing industry. Here is a brief demonstration of a tool I wrote to facilitate generating manuscripts in this format.

Until we get get to be chromed-up cyborgs, we’re stuck with our meat bodies, and like many things, they need regular maintenance. Here is a brief introduction to keeping your body moving as someone who spends a lot of time sitting down.

Lua is probably my favourite “little language” - a language designed to have low cognitive load, and be easy to learn and use. It’s embedded in a lot of software, such as Redis, NGINX via OpenResty and Wireshark. It’s also used as a scripting language in games such as World of Warcraft and Roblox via Luau. This post is a brief love letter to the language, with some examples of why I like it so much.

In my first post in this pseudo-series, we covered more of the theory and organisational practices around building and operating a database-as-a-service platform. In this post, I’ll cover some of the more technical aspects of this that I think are worth considering, drawn from my own experience.