The Tangiest Blog

The Bumper List of Books for Boys

Thu, 25 Sep 2025 21:00:00 +0100

Earlier in the summer, I came across this Twitter thread that lamented the lack of modern books for boys to read, and suggesting a number of books and authors for young boys. My son (about to turn 9) is a keen reader, but I’ve noticed that outside of the Harry Potter series, and Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson books, there aren’t many recent adventure books for boys that age. Thinking back to what I was reading when I was 8-10 years old, I was mainly reading comics (The Beezer, The Beano, The Dandy and then the The Eagle and The Victor). I’ve previously blogged about how I got into reading books when I started reading Gorilla Adventure by Willard Price around the age of 9.

Setting the Default Audio Device on Windows 10

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 21:15:00 +0100

I recently started using a new wireless headset for my personal laptop (actually an old one that I hadn’t used for years). I generally use it in the evening when my son has gone to bed. Unfortunately, when I restart my laptop the next morning, it defaults to using the headset, despite this being turned off and back in the drawer. So, after manually switching back to the laptop’s default speakers a few times, it was time to automate this.

What I'm Reading #10

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 22:45:00 +0100

The latest in an irregular series of posts on what I’ve been reading.

Books

Watching the Door by Kevin Myers

A fantastic book that captures the grim despair of living and working in Belfast as a journalist during the height of the Troubles. I read it in a day, and genuinely found it difficult to put down. One line that caught my eye was when describing the security situation in 1972, he wrote "[security policies in Northern Ireland] were decided by the dimwits of Stormont, who would have had trouble managing a garden tap.". Much has thankfully changed in NI since then but not the quality of our politicians and civil service.

Serverless Days Belfast

Wed, 21 May 2025 22:30:00 +0100

I was lucky enough to attend the Serverless Days Belfast conference last week. This year, while there were the usual talks on serverless and cloud development, the spotlight was definitely on AI aided development.

I’ll first list my standout sessions from the day and then give my thoughts on the conference and topics overall.

A Tale of Two Monoliths: Serving Up a Modernisation Feast at Flipdish

Ryan Shirley & Marc O’Morain from Flipdish gave what I thought was the best talk of the day - it presented a business problem, identified the underlying technical issues, designed a solution, and then detailed how the solution was implemented and the various issues meet on the way. It was an old-fashioned developer war story, and I really enjoyed it. The presentation had plenty of implementation details and set out an approach to introducing serverless into an existing codebase. Well worth watching.

A Year in Books - 2024

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 16:30:00 +0100

Like most people, I read mainly on a computer screen - articles, emails and social media (though I try and fail to avoid it). Last year, I saved over 700 long form articles, and likely read over twice as many.

Despite reading so much online, I actually prefer reading physical books. Last year, I read 39 books, a drop compared to 2023 (65 books). I initially thought this was down to reading longer books and more non-fiction, but looking at the figures, it seems 2023 was an outlier with far more fiction than usual.

Review of 2024

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 23:30:00 +0100

Highs

The highlight of 2024 for me was spending time with friends and family. We started 2024 with a fantastic trip to visit my wife’s family in Shenzhen, our first visit to China since before Covid. Over the summer, my wife’s mother traveled to Belfast to spend several weeks with us, and we enjoyed several short breaks and day trips with her across Northern Ireland.

Update 01/10/2025 Someone has complained about the previous photo that appeared in this post, so I have reluctantly changed it. Alpacas have rights too, people!!

J'accuse

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 23:00:00 +0100

I recently signed up for a free subscription of the J’accuse paper, and received this charming email from Tim Chapman, the editor:

J’accuse

Ah. So you’ve selected a ‘free subscription’.

How many tens of thousands of pounds has the taxpayer invested in to your education?

And for all that largesse, you haven’t made yourself economically productive enough to afford a piddling contribution of £8 a month.

I’m embarrassed on your behalf. And I hate you.

Christmas

Fri, 03 Jan 2025 23:00:00 +0100

Happy New Year to everyone!

Just a reminder for my future self that this Christmas, I spent the day with my son building Lego and it was great!

What I'm Reading #9

Tue, 23 Jul 2024 19:45:00 +0100

The latest in an irregular series of posts on what I’ve been reading.

Books

The Running Grave by Robert Galbraith

The latest in JK Rowling’s Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike detective series, and also the longest (weighing in at 945 pages). I found it a gripping read, and the best book in this excellent series so far.

Real Tigers by Mick Herron

Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series is growing on me, and I enjoyed reading this, the third book in this series. I haven’t yet seen the Apple TV series, but I’m looking forward to seeing Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, the slovenly boss from hell.

VS Code Extensions for Python

Tue, 18 Jun 2024 19:30:00 +0100

I’ve been coding in Python for the past few months, and using VS Code as my main editor. The main extensions I’ve been using for Python development are:

Python Obviously, I use the Python extension for VS Code, which also installs:
- Pylance to provide Intellisense while developing with Python in VS Code
- Python Debugger for Python debugging within VS Code.
Python Indent to provide valid indentation for Python code, along with…
Indent Rainbow to colour code my indentation, and highlight any incorrect indentation
Python Environment Manager to create and manage the virtual environment for my Python projects
Auto Docstring to generate docstrings for Python functions
Black Formatter to use the Black code formatter. But I keep hearing about Ruff and really need to look into using it instead.

Listing VS Code Extensions

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 19:30:00 +0100

To create a list of your installed VS Code extensions, you can use the following PowerShell command:

code --list-extensions > C:\Temp\VSCodeExtensions.txt

# To create a list of extensions to install:
code --list-extensions | % { "code --install-extension $_" } > C:\Temp\VSCodeExtensions.txt

Alternatively, you can use the Settings Sync extension to export your VS Code extensions and configuration.

What I'm Reading #8

Wed, 05 Jun 2024 18:30:00 +0100

The latest in a very irregular series of posts on what I’ve been reading.

Books

A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel

I’m currently at page 769 of 872 in this book. It has taken me 7 weeks to get this far. I have no idea if I will actually finish this book. I do know that if anyone else other than Hilary Mantel had written it, I would have given up on it long ago. It is an exploration of the leading figures of the French Revolution. It is a very middle class novel: in the midst of the chaos and upheaval of the uprising and subsequent Terror, it focuses on the internal lives of the protagonists, and as a result it comes across as very dry and dusty despite its tumultuous setting. Occasionally, I read a passage in this book that reminds me of how great a writer Mantel was, and it keeps me plodding through it.

Generating and using the Python requirements.txt file

Wed, 15 May 2024 20:15:00 +0100

The Python requirement file is a way of documenting the Python modules used in a project. It is a simple text file that lists the modules and packages required by the project. The file contents are generally similar to this (based on the Ansible project’s requirements.txt file):

jinja2 >= 3.0.0
PyYAML >= 5.1  # PyYAML 5.1 is required for Python 3.8+ support
cryptography
packaging
resolvelib >= 0.5.3, < 1.1.0  # dependency resolver used by ansible-galaxy

To create a requirements.txt file in a Python project, we can use the following command in the project root directory (with the virtual environment activated):

Today I Learnt

Wed, 01 May 2024 21:00:00 +0100

I’m currently working in a new role, splitting my time between (legacy) application support and development. As part of this role, I’m coding using Python, some PHP as well as Oracle databases. While I’ve used both Oracle and PHP slightly before, I’ve had a steep learning curve over the past few months picking up Python. As a result, I’ve started keeping a log of useful concepts and snippets that I’m going to start compiling here on my blog under the TIL tag.

It's Alive

Tue, 30 Apr 2024 20:30:00 +0100

After a period of inactivity, this blog is alive once more!

Searching for Your Next Job

Thu, 14 Dec 2023 21:00:00 +0100

After speaking to some colleagues about looking for a new job, I thought it be useful to document how I search for a new role.

Before getting into the details, it is worth highlighting:

Don’t rage quit

Some jobs are simply horrible, and can really bring you down mentally. If you are in one of those jobs, try and stick with it, while looking for a new job becomes your number one priority. I’ve rage quit before, and while it was deeply satisfying initially (and really helped my mental health), it took a time to find a new job. Employers definitely prefer to employ someone already in a job over someone who is not. In the end, it would have been less stressful to stick with the crap job and find a new role before giving my notice.

Conscience

Thu, 13 Apr 2023 17:00:00 +0100

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions

Lillian Hellman, 1952.

Taken from her letter to the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

VS Code - A Developer`s Penknife

Sat, 11 Mar 2023 20:30:00 +0100

I’ve recently started working in a financial organisation, and as a result, I’m working in a very locked down environment. Which means no NotePad++, no Git Extensions, or any of my favourite utilities. But what I do have is VS Code. So how can I use VS Code to replace NotePad++ and my other go-to tools?

NotePad++

Generally, I use NotePad++ for occasional text editing, and in the past for any serious regex work. VS Code can easily deal with text editing (though the way it seems to associate random text files with your open workspace is annoying).

Visual Studio Extensions

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 22:25:00 +0100

Following on from my list of VS Code extensions, this is a list of Visual Studio extensions I use.

Extensions I’m Using

Productivity Power Tools
- An extension pack installer will install each of the individual components of Productivity Power Tools for Visual Studio 2022, including extensions for:
  - Copy As Html
  - Fix Mixed Tabs
  - Shrink Empty Lines 2022
  - Solution Error Visualizer
- Available for all versions of Visual Studio
Markdown Editor
- VS Code is my editor of choice for Markdown, but I usually install this extension for quick edits to a solution’s ReadMe file
- Supports VS2022
Output Enhancer
- Adds custom styling to the Visual Studio output window
- Supports VS2012-2022
Visual Studio Spell Checker
- VS2017 and VS2019
Viasfora
- This extension improves the readability of your code by adding:
  - Matching color brackets
  - (Additional) keyword highlighting
- See https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2021/09/29/bracket-pair-colorization
Code Maid
- For those who aren’t willing to pay for a ReSharper license (like me, see below), then I would recommend this extension
- I have also used and like Visual Assist but Code Maid is a bit simpler and more focused in my opinion

Visual Studio Extensions To Evaluate

Fine Code Coverage
- This is a basic unit test coverage tool recommended by a colleague in work that I plan to try out.
Slow-Cheetah
- An extension for transformations for XML files (such as app.config) and JSON files

Extensions I No Longer Use

ReSharper
- I recently was given a ReSharper license in work, and after using ReSharper for a week, after a break of several years, found myself deeply unimpressed. The extension impacted Visual Studio’s performance, the additional refactorings that it offered weren’t that useful (the default refactorings in Visual Studio now cover the majority of my use cases), and while the code suggestions were useful, in a world of .editorconfig files, I’m unconvinced it is worth the performance hit or the yearly subscription fee.
Trailing Whitespace Visualizer
- This extension is simply no longer required when using an .editorconfig file.
Prettier
- For JavaScript
- For C#
- Again, with the use of .editorconfig files, I’m not sure I see a continued need for Prettier.
NUnit 3 Test Adapter
- An adapter for running NUnit tests in Visual Studio. This used to be an essential extension for me as I have little time for MSTest. However, xUnit is a modern rewrite of the NUnit framework, and can be run directly in Visual Studio without an adaptor. I’m seeing more and more projects choosing to use xUnit over NUnit.

What I'm Reading #7

Tue, 22 Feb 2022 22:30:00 +0100

The latest in an irregular series of posts on what I’ve been reading.

Books

Bomber by Len Deighton

I’ve just finished re-reading this novel on a fictional RAF bomber raid on Germany during World War II. With a cast of hundreds, it gave you an insight into what those involved (pilots, civilians, firefighters and many others) experienced during a bomber raid. An awe inspiring piece of writing, whilst simultaneously horrifying - this novel doesn’t shy away from the industrial scale suffering and brutality inflicted by the large scale bombing raids.