djrobstep.com
I'm Robert Lechte, an idealist who wants more humanistic technology and a fairer society. I'm not actually a DJ, and not to be confused with Robert Lechte the swedish handball player.
My interest areas/hobby-horses:
User interfaces
I want to build radically different user interfaces, that remove the divide between users and programmers. I want development environments and operating systems that are instantaneous, interactive, and fully, pervasively programmable.
I want interfaces that don't constrain information artifically by trapping it within separate applications.
Databases, particularly migration tools
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.
I'm building a radically different migration tool because I believe the existing tools suck.
Right now I'm working on a startup: DatabaseCI, to solve problems with database deployments - we're automating test/dev/staging data
Democratic socialism
I want an end to poverty and a classless society, with Norway levels (at least) of public ownership and shared wealth. We should do a bigger welfare state, sovereign wealth funds, UBI, and publicly owned green energy. PS bernie woulda won
Recent posts
I write here and there mostly about the future of programming, and left politics.
published | title |
---|---|
2020-02-15 |
A Python ORM for the ORM haters |
2020-01-21 |
Programs are a prison: Rethinking the fundamental building blocks of computing interfaces |
2019-12-01 |
Towards a convention for table ordering |
2019-11-28 |
Australia's super system is three trillion dollars of unused worker power |
2019-03-05 |
A Job Guarantee is a terrible idea |
2019-03-03 |
Choose your examples carefully |
Speaking publicly
I talk at conferences and meetups occasionally, my preferred topic is more humanistic software. I also talk about databases, and sometimes even politics.
date | title | conference | location |
---|---|---|---|
2019-08-04 |
Instant-feedback, instant-debugging Python coding | PyCon Australia | Sydney |
2017-09-08 |
Your database migrations are bad, and you should feel bad | PostgresOpen |
San Francisco |
Open source projects
I'm the author of a number of open source software projects.
project | description | |
---|---|---|
migra | A schema comparison and migration tool for PostgreSQL |
|
results | Tabular data and SQL for people who don't have time to faff about |
|
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 |
|
sqlbag | Miscellaneous boilerplate for working with SQL databases |
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 github sponsorship.