I test out the imagiCharm, a portable LED charm meant to help girls learn to express themselves with code.

I bid farewell to the Great Language Game, a passion project that inspired over 3 million people to listen to languages they might never normally encounter. For developers, I share resources for making your own game around languages.

I review Angela Duckworth's book and critically discuss grit as a concept.

I check out Ikea's hydroponic unit for growing indoor food crops, walking through process of growing my first crop of salad greens.

An introduction to the asyncio module in Python 3.5, which supports cooperative multitasking in Python.

The Habit Clock is an experiment in tracking the time pass for things that we care about.

Insects are meant to be an environmentally friendly source of protein, an alternative to meat. This post documents my first encounter with insects as food.

How our use of attention affects our mental wellbeing; strategies for dealing with wayward attention and unhelpful thoughts.

Helping loved ones past the unhelpful "just world" mentality.

Be more productive on long-running tasks by recording your context, to make resuming where you left off much faster.

A recap of themes and outstanding talks from PyCon US 2014 in Montreal.

I go over the first confusion data release from the Great Language Game, including some 16 million guesses and a ton of information about what languages people find hard.

After a long time on OS X, I decided to revisit Linux by installing it on my MacBook Pro, fully kitted out with disk encryption and a next generation filesystem.

A few days ago I was cycling to work when a white sedan accelerated across the road and ploughed into me and my bike before driving off. I was quite lucky: I ended up with just a broken right wrist and some grazes. Still, losing my dominant hand sucks. Here's how I've tried to make up for it.

Logic programming is an elegant way to specify dependencies for setting up and managing servers. This post introduces Marelle, an SWI-Prolog command-line tool designed to bootstrap new servers and ensure their configuration is correct.

After an incredible week, the Great Language Game has been updated with 10 new languages, more samples for each language and more authentic samples for a handful of problematic languages. Curious as to how you've been going? We cover the stats over the scores people have achieved so far.

In just a few days, the Great Language Game has taken off! The initial response from the linguistic and hacker communities was astounding. I discuss the launch, and future plans for the game.

Introducing the Great Language Game! The game asks you to guess what language is being spoken, out of some 68 possibilities, and in the process learn something about the vast variety of languages spoken throughout the world.

Reflections on starting to learn a new language as a beginner, a position I've found myself in many times before.

Embracing the Quantified Self movement wholeheartedly, I've been measuring what I eat, where I go and what I do for 77 days. I discuss the mechanics of measurement and what I got out of it.

What does success mean when you're studying another language? After years studying multiple langauges, I look at what language study means in terms of relative difficulty and attrition.

Why do we use the names we do? Drawing parallels between linguistics and the choices we make when programming.

A guide to basic pathfinding, explaining how to implement A* search for the 2011 Google AI challenge.