djrobstep.com
I'm Rob, an idealistic software developer who wants more humanistic technology and a fairer society.
My interest areas/hobby-horses:
Databases, particularly migration tools.
I'm building a radically different migration tool because I believe the existing tools suck. I'm also building a new service: CI for databases, to solve problems with database deployments. Register your interest.
Democratic socialism
I want socialism and a classless society, and I think the best way to achieve that is by relentlessly pushing society's institutions to the left, rebuilding working class power through unions, and seizing all the capital into public ownership. PS bernie woulda won
User interfaces
I want to build a radically different user interface, that removes the divide between users and programmers, and doesn't constrain information artifically by trapping it within separate applications.
Recent posts
| title | published |
|---|---|
| Trust an Australian on this: A Job Guarantee is a terrible idea | 2019-03-05 |
| Choose your examples carefully | 2019-03-03 |
Speaking publicly
I talk at conferences and meetups occasionally. Mostly about databases, but sometimes politics too.
| date | title | conference | location |
|---|---|---|---|
2018-01-25 |
Unions: Hacking society's operating system |
linux.conf.au |
Sydney |
2017-09-08 |
Your database migrations are bad, and you should feel bad | PostgresOpen |
San Francisco |
Open source projects
I'm the creator of several open source software projects.
| project | description | |
|---|---|---|
| migra | A schema comparison and migration tool for PostgreSQL |
|
| sqlakeyset | Multi-column, multi-direction offset-free paging library for sqlalchemy |
|
| logx | Zero-config best practice python logging |
|
| pgnotify | Easily listen and process PostgreSQL NOTIFY messages |
|
| autovenv | Automatic python version and virtualenv management |
|
| csvx | Better python csv file handling |
|
| sqlbag | Miscellaneous boilerplate for working with SQL databases |
These projects are a labour of love. I'm not paid to work on any of them, and they don't have any other source of funding.
If you use these projects, or if you'd just like to support the cause of open source software, and encourage further development, please consider supporting my efforts thru Patreon.
Don't get mad, get results
Through my work I've also helped develop and release results, a toolkit to make it easier to work with databases and tabular data.
Work
These days I design and build software the Australian Council of Trade Unions, trying to play a small part in rebuilding working class power.
Before that I worked on making government services better at Australia's Digital Transformation Agency, and on supercomputing data warehousing and analytics at New Zealand eScience Infrastructure.
My go-to tools are Python and PostgreSQL.
Technically, my main interest and specialty is at the intersection of database and application software layers: How to structure applications and databases to work better together.