djrobstep.com

I'm Robert Lechte, an idealistic software developer 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 inferfaces 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 working class power through unions, 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.

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
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

If you use these projects and would like to support their continued development, you can sponsor me on GitHub.

Don't get mad, get `results`

I've also helped develop and release results, a toolkit to make it easier to work with databases and tabular data.

published	title	published in
2019-12-01	Towards a convention for table ordering
2019-11-28	Australia's super system is three trillion dollars of unused worker power
2019-11-26	The missing clink: What US diners could teach Australian cafes	The Age / SMH
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