These are stories of my time working at Sussex University 1990-2024. PDF version here. Here's a list of the contents, and below that there's a brief introduction. Contents Introduction The early years 1990-98 Part 1 Interview and arrival From secretaries to co-ordinators Students, seminars, offices Admissions New...

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Let’s say you’re running a web service where users can add other users as friends. How do you store each user’s friends list in the database? The simplest solution would be to use one large table called “friends” with each row being an entry on one user’s friends list. How well does that perform if you scale up to...

Nachdem ich in meinem Text erklärt habe, wie ich die Nachrichten lese, habe ich viele Kommentare erhalten. Ich dachte, dass die Ideen so normal oder gemeinsam sind, dass ich sie nicht geteilt hätte. Aber ich musste sagen, dass ich viele Jahre lang meine Lebensgewohnheiten geändert habe. Die Zeit, Energie und kleinen...

I want to read all the newsletters I subscribed to. I want to read everything in the ten web dev community slacks I joined. I want to read everything on the seven Discord servers I am on. I want to read every blog post in the hundreds of feeds I follow. I want to read every toot of the people I follow on Mastodon. I...

Here's a demonstration of a technique that makes it possible to animate logos with as little HTML as possible and a little bit of CSS.

Una cosa que va aparejada a mi recientemente readquirido gusto por hacer cosas en la Web es que, de rebote, estoy pasando mucho más tiempo del que pasaba antes sentado delante de mi ordenador. Me paso mi jornada laboral delante de un ordenador, termino dicha jornada laboral, hago alguna cosa en casa… y sigo pasando...

Alas, my second time racing in St. George did not go as smoothly as the first time.

I am currently organizing a visit to a major festival, with over 175 bands playing over 4 days at around a dozen different venues scattered across the city. It's quite a logistical challenge. Which bands do I want to see, and do they play with enough time in between to get from Location A to Hall B? So, I copied all...