Finnian's blog

Software Engineer based in New Zealand

Raspberry Pi Swarm

My first project utilising the Docker containerisation platform - building a Raspberry Pi swarm and trying to work out what to do with it.

3-Minute Read

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine reminded me about Docker. Docker is a containerisation platform which allows you to deploy different systems very quickly and efficiently on the same host machine. Not only that, you can put several Docker hosts together in order to create a swarm. It’s like VMs, but cooler.

4-Minute Read

My father, Ben Anderson plays with numbers. As his Twitter bio says “big data, small data, open data, any data”. He works with R a lot and has been persuading me to take a look at it. I’ve held off until now because I’m all for analysing data in real time (primarily using delightful JS libraries such as Chart.js and D3.js). As far as I understood it, R is geared towards static data analysis and because of that, is able to utilise the hardware it runs on to optimise…

3-Minute Read

Friday night, or more specifically, Friday February 26th 2016 at 19:45:57, I was having a group Skype call with Alexander CraggsMiles Budden and Tom Emmerson when Alexander started complaining that all the URL shorteners out there were becoming too long. To clarify, URL shorteners were becoming bloated. He suddenly said, “Let’s make a URL shortener”. The situation escalated very rapidly and within 5 minutes, Miles had bought the domain subr.pw for an astronomical price of…

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