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Colin Webb

Moving to Hakyll

My blog previously used Octopress, and I had wanted to stop using it for a while. There is nothing wrong with Octopress; it just didn't fit well with me. It has a lot of features, so seems overcomplicated for my use-case. It's also written in Ruby.

DynamoDB with Scala Macros

I've spent the last year using AWS DynamoDB at work. When we initially searched for a Scala client for DynamoDB, we had the following criteria:

  • Good for Scala beginners
  • Up to date
  • Well documented

Sadly, none of the Scala libraries available at that time matched all three criteria. The most up-to-date libraries were not suitable for a team starting out with Scala and DynamoDB. The most beginner-friendly libraries were out-of-date, and most only had superficial documentation.

Getting Started with Haskell's Warp

I recently started playing with Haskell's Warp in my effort to learn Haskell. Warp is small and fast web server, and doesn't come bundled with much. It also has no "magic" in it, which I think is a very good thing.

Learning Akka Streams

This blog post differs from my usual ones; I'm writing it as I learn something. As such, it is more of a story that contains errors and misunderstanding than a factual blog post.

The Virtues of Side Projects

I write software for a living, and most of my side projects are software based too. I view side projects as a tool for learning. Learning by doing.

Using Elm in Octopress

Elm is a functional programming language aimed at the browser. It aims to replace all HTML, CSS, and JavaScript code. It borrows a lot from Haskell, and promises that if your Elm code compiles, it will run without exceptions.