The other day I published my latest app – a little desktop-based number whose aim it is to make memorising chess openings as easy as falling off a log (this is apparently a real idiom). It’s called Pawnfork, and you can download it here. Of course, it’s not every day that I fire out a […]
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Optimise Your Chess Opening Play With the Help of My New App
I have created a simple new desktop app for memorising chess openings, and called it Pawnfork. There’s not too much to say about the app from the perspective of a user that I don’t say in my introductory video, which you can find above, but of course there is plenty to say about the development […]
Migrating a Spotify Listen-Logging App to AWS
Welcome back, dear reader. It’s been a bloody long time since I “done you a post”, which is a shame not so much in a literary sense as a financial one: Bluehost absolutely rinsed me a few months back with the cost of renewing my web hosting contract, and my subsequent inactivity is making that […]
A Catan Love Story; or, As My Miller Father Used To Remind Us Regularly Over the Dinner Table: No Pain, No Grain
Old and wizened you must have grown since last I put fingertip to keyboard key, to persist my thoughts in the digital universe; like the great Dumbledore, siphoning off memories into his Pensieve. A quaint little article published all the way back in November 2021 was my last offering at the altar of Will May’s […]
Soccer Simulation – Creating the Team Formation Graphics
Three months ago I released a web app called Soccer Simulation, which you can find here. The app, which in and of itself took around four months in the building, was really the culmination of a lifetime interest in football simulation, which you can read about here. During the development of the app, I had […]
Fun and Games with SQLAlchemy
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past couple of days transforming the data access layer of one of my Flask applications from a purely psycopg2-based mess to an SQLAlchemy-based not-quite-such-a-mess, and I thought I’d share some thoughts on the process. Introduction As a former data analyst, my face has been permanently sootened […]
Updates to Soccer Simulation
This is just a short post to point out a couple of recent updates to the Soccer Simulation app, inspired by recent suggestions by users. Add custom club names It is now possible to replace club names used in the simulation with your own, custom club names. This feature was requested by a couple of […]
Heroku and the Irreplicable Problem of the Sleeping Dyno
I was befuddled to say the least, the first time I stumbled across the Sleeping Dyno. For rather than manifesting itself in reptilian form, as a terrible lizard in its dormancy, presumably mustering its energies for some cataclysmic rampage – a sight that would, of course, have provoked minimal befuddlement – the Sleeping Dyno is […]
The Grand Unveiling of “Soccer Simulation”
Good morning ladies and gentlemen! This is my first post from my new home of Singapore, where I am currently holed up for a period of two weeks in a “quarantine hotel”, with * only * my wife Kate for company. We’ve been fully locked down for four days now, and overall it’s been surprisingly […]
A History of One Man’s Inexplicable Obsession with Football Simulation
Preamble In preparation for the release of my latest project, a football league simulation built in Python and served as a web app via Flask and Heroku, I thought it would make for a purgative experience to step through the history of my interest in football simulation. For it truly is a long and jumbled […]