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 challenges. 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.
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 | docs | code |
|---|---|---|---|
migra |
A schema comparison and migration tool for PostgreSQL |
docs | github |
sqlakeyset |
The only multi-column, multi-direction offset-free paging library for sqlalchemy |
github | |
logx |
Zero-config best practice python logging |
github | |
autovenv |
Automatic python version and virtualenv management |
docs | github |
csvx |
Better python csv file handling |
docs | github |
sqlbag |
Miscellaneous boilerplate for working with SQL databases |
github |
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.