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

published	title
2021-07-04	One simple design fix for the Olympic medal tally
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