Colin Webb

I like Ansible, but it has flaws. I'm going to assume you know what Ansible is, and that you have used it before.

Basic Ansible is amazing, compared to the alternatives. When the alternative is half-baked bash scripts that rely on special environmental state, and obscure notation that is used infrequently, it is not hard to better it. I've used other automation tools too. Puppet is the other automation tooling that I've spent considerable time with. Puppet and I did not agree with each other as it required me to learn hundreds of special syntax rules almost immediately.

I use LiveReloadX to automatically reload the browser as I work on my Hakyll-generated blog. LiveReloadX, and most other automatic reloading utilities work by watching the file system and notifying something in the browser to refresh the page.

H264 is a codec. MP4 is a file container, which can contain H264. If you want to display H264 video on a web browser, it needs muxing into MP4 or another file container format.

Higher order functions are functions that accept other functions as parameters. Higher kinded types are types that can accept other types as parameters. In Scala, the syntax F[_] is used to express that F is a higher-kinded type that can accept any type.

This is a Too Long; Didn't Read summary of the paper Neural Network Dynamics for Model-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning with Model-Free Fine-Tuning. Inspired by the blog post on the same paper published by the Berkeley Artifical Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab last week.

Three ways to do functional programming when working with the Play Framework.

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.

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 The most beginner-friendly libraries were out-of-date, and most only had superficial documentation.

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.

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.