Gareth Powell

OK, it's time to carry on with exploring neptune. I'm ready to build a web application. Step 1 is to build a client:

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/08/buil...

Manchester's memorial to the victims of nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Now another 40 years have passed. But once again, it doesn't feel we'll make another 40.

Right to buy in England ‘fuelled housing crisis and cost taxpayers £200bn’ Common Wealth report calls discounted sales of council homes one of the ‘largest giveaways in UK history’

"Right to Buy" was always a flawed - if not outright bad - policy. It should have included a clause requiring replacement social houses to be built with the money raised.

Given Thatcher's overall policies, though, I have to assume she wanted homeless people.

www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Starmer and Reeves should prepare UK for wealth tax, say top economists PM could raise ‘tens of billions’ while positioning Britain as progressive, say Thomas Piketty and others

Yes. A consultation and debate. Point out the self interest of those who oppose it.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Get early retirees off the golf course and back to work – why early retirement isn’t good for UK plc Giving up work in your 50s is a wealthy indulgence that should be discouraged – the new pension commission needs to widen its remit

Tail. Wagging dog.

Summary: we all need to be forced to work until we drop dead to keep the economy afloat.

Guardian readers deserve better.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

What is the connection between Luis Matos and his walk up music?

And, finally for now, If we are going to build an actual webapp, we need to track endpoints associated with users so that we can notify them when stock prices change.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/noti...

Once you've done a query in one direction, the other is easy.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/find...

Always be careful what you predict.

I have now wrapped up those "few...cases" but it was harder than what had gone before and were pretty orthogonal. So I now have *two* blobs of code to refactor.

Oh, well.

Now that we have all that data in the database(s), we can run a query to traverse the relationships and figure out what the current prices are of the stocks watched by a given user.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/watc...

And given that we've written some detritus, we need to be able to clean everything out and start again.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/clea...

Finally, we can get around to building a full graph of users and stocks (and the relationships between them).

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/buil...

Every test I wrote felt like it just needed a few lines of corresponding code.
The only real problem I ran into was with my tokenization code and that's a mess so I need to rewrite that now.
I stil have a few prefix/postfix cases to cover; I'll proablh do those on my flight down to Altanta tomorrow.

Coding went well on my transatlantic flight yesterday. Even though planes have wifi these days, I still like to have a project I can work on without any internet access. So I wrote the precednce parser for my deployer. I tried something radical and different and it fell out really easily.

With our connectivity issues resolved, we are finally in a position to try creating nodes inside Neptune.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/node...

Ofwat to be abolished as ministers look to create new water regulator Exclusive: Move follows intense criticism of utilities over sewage spills, shareholder payouts and ballooning debts

If the new regulator does not have the power to guillotine directors of failing water companies, it will be a failure.

www.theguardian.com/business/202...

It's the team meetings that kill me. I always want to say something but am interrupted by myself.

The three of us can't get along.

Nothing is very easy.

A long, long detour into the dark soul of using a VPN to connect to an AWS VPC.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/conn...

With the infrastructure in place, we can create some sample data and figure out how to get it into the database.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/popu...

Classic Home White.

Reasons speak for themselves.

Reading the original post more closely, I think it was intended to be rhetorical, but if so, didn't make that point well. It's not about the *answer*, it's about the *question*. The question "how complete is this project" is simply a category error.

I read some rando's post on LinkedIn the other day which really annoyed me. Asking one of those stupid trolling questions about "how do you know how done an agile project is?"

My thoughts in full are here: gmmapowell.com/technology/a...

The first step (which is what had been holding this up) is to create a Neptune instance in AWS, along with some Dynamo Tables.

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/depl...

The first 90% of the project takes the first 90% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% (or more).

Last week, while I was stuck on my Tax Return project, I finally got around to exploring Graph Databases (AWS Neptune in particular). My write up of the experience begins today, and can be found here:

ignorancemaybestrength.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-gr...

Wow, I just learnt *about* three whole linguistic moods that I'd never even heard of before: optative, cohortative and desiderative. I think I may even have an understanding of what they're for.

Me and 5m other people on here...

That's looking really good. Looking forward to giving it a go!

I don't know who is in charge of organizing @metrolinksocal.bsky.social but it is incredibly brittle in face of problems and there appears to be no planning around resilience.

There are literally 20-30 trams in a queue from Deansgate to Market St right now.

Teach First job applicants will get in-person interviews after more apply using AI Graduate recruiter says much use of AI goes undetected as specialist says half of candidates are now using it

Will there come a point when people realize the traditional hiring model is just completely and hopelessly broken?

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...