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.

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 unionized working class power, and seizing all the capital into public ownership. PS bernie woulda won

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.

Recent posts

I write here and there mostly about the future of programming, and left politics.

published	title
2020-02-19	No Super increase is enough to fix retiree poverty, and pretending otherwise is dishonest
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	Trust an Australian on this: A Job Guarantee is a terrible idea
2019-03-03	Choose your examples carefully
2017-04-27	Thinking clearly about the problems of an ageing population
2017-04-23	The solution to the housing crisis is extremely simple

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 creator of several 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
csvx	Better python csv file handling
sqlbag	Miscellaneous boilerplate for working with SQL databases