tomspeak's comments

tomspeak | 5 years ago | on: Ask HN: Quiethn.com is down, what's the best low-UI alternative HN reader?

Hey, I made the site, didn't realise people actually used it.

https://github.com/tomspeak/quiet-hacker-news -- the source is here, you could host your own version or run it locally on demand.

tomspeak | 6 years ago | on: Ask HN: Great fiction books that have had a positive impact on your life?

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace has been the most impactful, but due to the length of the book it's hard for others to compete on the impact-per-page metric. I wrote about it in detail here https://speak.sh/posts/infinite-jest

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera showed me another perspective of love I had never considered. Gave me insight into vulnerability.

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes showed me how by looking through the world via a lens of intellect, you can often miss the point.

The Bus Driver Who Wanted To Be God by Etgar Keret a collection of some of my favourite short stories. Highly recommend.

tomspeak | 7 years ago | on: Slate JS – A customizable framework for building rich text editors

Also very interested in this, we've had issues with dealing with reconciling external copy and pasting.

tomspeak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you monitor your websites?

I use Ping [0], never used an alternative so not sure how it compares on features, but it has everything I need: uptime alerts, header & body requests. All packaged in a nice interface with a solid pricing structure.

[0] https://apex.sh/ping/

tomspeak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Would you still do software engineering/dev if you could do it all over?

This resonates with me. Although I did not get into programming for money, I have come to hold the belief that I could make significantly more money as a programmer in a non-programming field. Money aside, the problems can take you far out of your comfort zone. I recently worked for a fashion start-up and the number of interesting problems that did not resemble at all what you are used to in the CRUD world was fascinating.

tomspeak | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Have you shipped anything serious with a “serverless” architecture?

This is fascinating stuff — every time I use my oyster card I have wondered what it is doing behind the scenes.

Do you know of any write ups about TFL's infrastructure/processes? Would love to read about it.

I'd also like to buy whoever lead the TFL API's move from XML to JSON a coffee|beer!