Welcome To DurKode

Welcome To DurKode, my personal blog about code, university, and other things of interest. This blog is an attempt to catalogue my journeys and thoughts with relation to nearly anything, and hopefully provide some interesting material for whoever reads this site.

Who Is The Author (And What Does He Do)?

My name is Hamish Durkin, I am currently in my 3rd year of a Software Engineering degree at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney Australia. As you can probably guess from the degree, much of my life revolves around software. When I am not studying during the semester, I am working for the companies that sponsor my education (which if you feel like stalking can be found on my LinkedIn profile).

From a technology standpoint, I have varied and mixed interests. While through university I have learnt the programming languages pushed upon us (C, C++, Java), my go to language is Python, especially combined with Django when the task requires it. While I can hack together a front ends for programs, my real interests lie in the work done behind the scenes. Operating System wise, I use mainly Mac (for my laptop) and Ubuntu (desktop) in roughly equal doses, however have used Windows when needed (previous job or for gaming). I feel this information is important to share as it will dictate much of the content of this blog.

Why Does This Blog Exist?

This blog serves several functions.

1. To store and catalogue my thoughts and ideas. I find that my most productive periods are when I put things down in writing, be they plans, thoughts, a to-do list or anything else. Words are permanent and can be analysed, improved and shared. As amazing as I sometimes (deludedly) consider my brain to be, my thoughts share none of these properties. In essence the primary function of this blog is for my benefit, but hopefully the content will be relevant and engaging for a wider audience.
2. As a tutorial guide. Every so often I will do something technical (aka provision an server OS out of the box) and find myself trying to remember how to repeat the obscure sequence of hacks 6 months down the line. If I feel I will need to remember something again, I will document it here.
3. To improve my writing skills. In all honesty I have done very little proactively to improve my written communication skills in the last 5 years. Given that 5 years is a quarter of my life, this leaves me feeling slightly concerned. I have written next to nothing (with the exception of horrible software engineering reports) since leaving high school. This blog is one step to remedy that.

Why Start The Blog Now

Before coming to university, I had:

• Run a successful eBay business with my sister Nikki Durkin, who has gone on to found 99 Dresses.
• Run a profitable proxy network that evaded my schools (and judging by the number of users, thousands of other school's) web filters
• Sold a script for load testing websites via http proxies (don't ask, I was 13 at the time)
• Ran shaboogle.com (no longer operational) - a customisable homepage inspired by Google (That unfortunately google cut adSense for)
• Completed a few websites freelance jobs building websites (in CodeIgniter

I mention all of this as the last 2 years have been moreso about enjoying college life rather than working on similar side projects. While that was fun, I feel that now is the time to become more serious about my chosen profession. I want to get back to being more involved with my work, rather than just completing the required courses and doing my internships. I don't want to be an average software engineer. I want to be at the top of my field. If I want to get there, I will have to kick my efforts up a notch, and there is no time like the present to do so.

Underlying Technology

This blog is powered by Ghost running the Uno theme for Ghost. I chose Ghost as it is a no-frills approach to blogging, allowing me to write my posts in markdown (which makes me happy).