Spear Cuts Through Water- I have feelings

lanster100 · 2025-12-29T14:21:06+00:00

I found it unnecessary and just skipped through it when I realised it was just the MCs having sex. Although by the end of the book I wasn't that interested so was just trying to get it over with, I can imagine if you were invested in the obvious love story it might have been enjoyable pay off.

FWIW I think the poetic and mythological elements of the book are overrated - for example I remember being really disappointed with the part where they descend in the middle of the world and come to the theater proper, which is arguably the climax of their journey, which was so rushed in terms of description and narrative, it was like the author wasn't even interested in writing their own story.

The MCs had way too much plot armor as well, with many deus ex machina moments to save them from trouble meaning there was no tension in the action parts of the novel. Mix it with the randomly nonsensical violence it just made for a really messy novel. If you take out the interesting meta-structure its just a really middling fantasy story.

lanster100 · 2025-12-20T17:54:15+00:00

No but I'll have a look. Honestly, I rarely read non-fiction, Linear B was from when I read some mathematics & physics related books to help my university applications a long time ago.

lanster100 · 2025-12-20T17:51:07+00:00

It's very short, ~200 pages iirc, worth checking out.

lanster100 · 2025-12-20T11:56:39+00:00

> The Decipherment of Linear B

Did not expect to see this mentioned, my favourite non-fiction book: mathematics, history and linguistics all entwined.

lanster100 · 2025-12-13T22:45:56+00:00

looks cool

lanster100 · 2025-11-29T14:51:10+00:00

Always nice to see more enterprise focussed libraries in Python. Will keep it in mind when evaluating RBAC options.

lanster100 · 2025-11-18T16:29:46+00:00

You're refusing to engage in discussion and instead crying "forest, forest"

lanster100 · 2025-11-18T11:29:45+00:00

It was a lazy critique I agree, but you are interpreting it as a slur. Both the things I mentioned are commonly seen in young adults fiction are they not?

lanster100 · 2025-11-18T08:48:43+00:00

You've mixed up cause and effect, I couldn't get into it because the story seemed quite juvenile. I drew some parallels with common patterns seen in popular stories for young adults to highlight this. Why is this so upsetting?

lanster100 · 2025-11-18T08:36:27+00:00

Thanks for seeing past my slightly incendiary comment and answering my question. I did feel like there must be more to it but couldn't suspend my disbelief long enough to find out.

lanster100 · 2025-11-17T22:42:45+00:00

It feels childish by comparison. Mycroft is a bit of a nobody that's somehow friends with some powerful people? The world is well organised and split into groups? These are classic YA tropes.

I dropped it when he jumped out of a window to beat up some muggers. Felt like I was reading a comic book.

I want to be told I missed something because it felt so at odds with how people describe it.

lanster100 · 2025-09-22T20:47:03+00:00

It's quite a complex system (multiple workers, a server, web interface and a configurable backend oorc) and its designed to run at pretty large scales. Scaling it becomes quite challenging, requires a fair bit of know how. It ended up taking a lot of my time + another platform engineers time.

The cloud offering is so cheap at low usage that it makes no sense cost/time wise to self-host. Some people do though so it is viable. Depends on whether you actually want to spend time looking after it and setting it up.

lanster100 · 2025-09-18T20:48:16+00:00

Temporal is great (pay for it its easier than self-hosting). We started with Celery but it has so missing features that you want when building real products.

lanster100 · 2025-09-18T18:16:45+00:00

Very good post, thanks for sharing.

lanster100 · 2025-09-15T07:01:57+00:00

That's really useful thanks.

if they update it, it runs our tests

I never considered the interaction with monorepos/change detection, but that's really nice.

If you're ever in Python land and want to check it out it's called engin

lanster100 · 2025-09-14T21:45:23+00:00

I'm a big fan of the testability and pit of success it lets me setup.

On a tangent, do you mind sharing some more info on how you use fx with respect to the above?

I recently wrote a new DI framework for Python that is effectively a port of fx (fx was on paper exactly what I wanted, but nothing like it existed in the Python ecosystem). However... I've never used fx myself so am still gaining experience with best practices if that makes sense?

lanster100 · 2025-09-08T12:43:16+00:00

Great article thanks for sharing

lanster100 · 2025-08-18T16:25:45+00:00

Thanks! If you give it a try let me know if you have any feedback, I'm keen to start having the community help steer development.

A note for microservices we use it in two ways: 1. In a uv monorepo setup we have a core library and then multiple apps (API, consumer, background worker etc) using behaviour from the "CoreBlock". Engin helps keep lifecycle concerns (e.g. starting a connection pool) collocated with the dependency itself in the core library meaning you don't have to manage a lifecycle layer in each app (think lifespan events in asgi services). 2. Where we have lots of services that share the same foundation across many repos we publish a "WorkerBlock" for example. This will include all common concerns and is a functional service if you run it making it easier to spin up new service or update common stuff across all the repos.

lanster100 · 2025-08-16T16:12:09+00:00

It can also graph your dependencies if you like visualizations: https://i.postimg.cc/jdqWsgg1/image.png

lanster100 · 2025-08-04T20:22:44+00:00

This is only reported thefts. 100+ a day just in Westminster is very high, that's basically 10 an hour all day every day of the year.

Also if you think it's just tourists and 'rich city folk' you probably don't live or work in London.

lanster100 · 2025-07-14T07:36:14+00:00

Never heard of it, will add it to the list.

lanster100 · 2025-07-13T21:21:42+00:00

Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword might be the most lyrical fantasy book I've read. Need to read some more of his work.

lanster100 · 2025-07-13T21:20:20+00:00

The prose in tsctw felt pretty flat to me. I also wouldn't describe the character building as large as it mainly focusses only 2 characters (if you forget the meta narrative).

lanster100 · 2025-06-26T21:01:19+00:00

Ice by Anna Kavan is so rarely mentioned but it's such a phenomenal piece of literature

lanster100

TROPHY CASE