DominicHamon.com

Life is like a grapefruit

London Calling

It’s been nearly three years since I last wrote something here. I’ve been sharing snippets of life on Twitter and Instagram, but found the veneer of social interaction wore thin and constant notifications became a driver of distraction. Turning them off left me with the sense I was shouting banalities into an echoing void. So […]

Posted on 2018/04/19 by dominic in Uncategorized | Tagged personal | Leave a comment

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust

Three months ago, we adopted Jedi who was promptly renamed Ziggy. Here he is, on the day we adopted him, while we were filling out the paperwork. We were told he was probably two years old1, and his slight limp was probably from his horrible maltreatment or a previous injury. He was treated incredibly badly, […]

Posted on 2015/05/29 by dominic in personal | Tagged dog rescue, pooch, ziggy | 1 Comment

The only winning move is not to play

Like many, many others, I’ve been following the events in Ferguson, Missouri with a mixture of fascination and horror. After a couple of nights of reading reports of post-curfew tear gas, armed protesters, tanks, and automatic weapons, it strikes me that escalation on either side of this dispute is a strategy that can only end in […]

Posted on 2014/08/18 by dominic in personal | Tagged ferguson, politics, wargames | Leave a comment

s/GOOG/TWTR/

A little over three years ago1, I left LucasArts to join Google. I have now left Google to join Twitter. I have an amazing opportunity to join the Mesos team at a point in their development that is ideal: The technology is built, the company has invested heavily in it, but there’s still a huge amount to […]

Posted on 2014/02/05 by dominic in personal | Tagged google, job, twitter | Leave a comment

URL shortener in go

I recently combined all my various blogs into this one and then realised that, yet again, the length of my name is a pain. Especially when it comes to URLs. I also realised that I’d never tried to build a URL shortener, so I did. Full source available here. There are a few tutorials around […]

Posted on 2014/01/19 by dominic in coding, web | Tagged coding, github, go | Leave a comment

All the small things

Someone, on checking out my github page, recently commented that I’m more of a breadth than a depth developer. I’m not sure that this is entirely accurate, though I didn’t take offence, but it is true that many of my personal projects are small one-off toys. This post is a tour of some of them. […]

Posted on 2014/01/10 by dominic in coding | Tagged c++, github, go | Leave a comment

gomud

I needed an excuse to learn go, and none of the usual candidate projects that I usually use to pick up a new language seemed to fit well. I was thinking back to how I started programming, and the transition from hobby programming to professional was largely thanks to working as a creator on Discworld […]

Posted on 2013/11/01 by dominic in coding | Tagged github, go, MUD | Leave a comment

Hole hearted

Rodney Jones is a jazz guitarist who has played with some of the greats, including James Brown and Dizzy Gillespie. This may seem largely irrelevant but it’ll make sense later. I rarely play the guitar around those outside my immediate family. I’ve been playing for over 20 years but I have no sense if I’m any […]

Posted on 2013/09/18 by dominic in personal | Tagged bragging, guitar | Leave a comment

Typed data for performance boost

After reading John McCutchan’s recent post on numeric computation in Dart, and a conversation with Srdjan Mitrovic from the Dart VM team, I made some changes to the Dart port of Box2D in the hope of improving performance. The specific commits that make up this change are here and here, and this change has been released […]

Posted on 2013/06/05 by dominic in performance, web | Tagged box2d, dart, dart vm, dartbox2d, performance | Leave a comment

Star Trekkin’

My review of Star Trek Into Darkness can be succinctly written: As a film, I enjoyed it. As a Star Trek film, I didn’t. There are two specific reasons why it didn’t work for me as a Star Trek movie. First, after the first J J Abrams movie, I was encouraged that they’d found a way to […]

Posted on 2013/05/25 by dominic in personal | Tagged reviews, star trek | Leave a comment