I'm Ellie. I write software, ride motorcycles, and generally just love to make things. I'm also pretty partial to
some photography + weightlifting 💪
You'll find that I mostly write about what I'm working on, how I'm spending my time, and things I have learned.
2022, my year in review
2022 has probably been one of the best years of my life, so I’d like to do my best to document everything that has happened - away from social media, and on something a little longer form! Who knows, maybe I’ll be posting something similar at the end of 2023. I’m writing this not so much for other people to read, but moreso for me to remember. I try to take the possibility that every day could be my last pretty seriously, and I’m really happy that I can look back on this year and feel like I’ve made the most of it....
Building an iPod for 2022
I modified an old iPod Video with more storage, a new casing, and more battery life. Also some fancy software :)
Don't forget the human
Computers are cold and heartless. They don’t lie, and they don’t care if you scream and swear at them. You can abuse them all day long, and they’ll still efficiently flip bits and push pixels. But… people aren’t. Behind every piece of software, there’s at least one human. Who has a heart, and who cares what you think. Who has hopes, and dreams, and fears. Who feels. This is something I’ve been wanting to write in one form or another for quite a while now, and I’ve been rewriting this post for a little too long....
I've started a personal wiki
There’s not much there at the moment, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to do for a while.
My tools are going Rusty
Command line tools, rewritten in Rust
I built a new keyboard
I love building keyboards, here’s my new Planck
Rest APIs and SwiftUI
Just answering a question from someone. SwiftUI has a neat pattern for handling async data responses
Lessons learned with Swift + iOS development
I’ve been writing a lot of Swift and SwiftUI lately, here’s what I have learned
My backup script
I bought a new external SSD, here’s a simple script I’m using to backup my laptop to it
Geospatial queries with MongoDB
I’m currently playing with MongoDB and its geospatial queries. It’s pretty interesting so far, so I just thought I’d write something up to show how I’m using it with PyMongo! Firstly, the obvious pip install pymongo is needed. We will need a mongo client first, which is easy enough from pymongo import MongoClient client = MongoClient() It’s pretty neat - by default, MongoClient will connect to mongodb://localhost:27017. You might want to do something like this instead though...