I use my keyboards a lot, my job as a software engineer involves quite a lot of typing, I also spend quite a lot of my spare time in front of a computer. I’ve been daily driving small keyboards for a while and have been enjoying doing so. Here’s a bit about which keyboards and why I like them.

In September 2025 my wife and I spent just over 3 week in China, her first time back to her home country in 2 years and my third trip there, having been in 2017 and 2018. We spent most of our time in my wife’s home city of Chengdu, while also visited the nearby cities of Chongqing and Guiyang. This post is a collection of my thoughts and opinions on the places we visited, along with some photos I took during the trip.

I have finally bought a domain for this website and it is moving to samsm.ch. It will continue to be available at sams96.github.io for the time being but that should change at some point and will do so without warning.

Standout is a short series of shots taken in Switzerland between March 2021 and May 2024. They are photos showing telephone poles, electricity pylons, signposts, and fence posts standing out.

If you’re writing a database query for your web service and there’s pagination, you should always sort by a unique field like ID. This should also be done on top of any other sorting. Otherwise you can get double entries or lose results across pages.

5 years ago I wrote Rgeo, a small Go package for reverse geocoding (you input some coordinates, it gives you information about the location). Today I am putting the projected on an indefinite hiatus.

I’ve been working on web backends in Go for the past 5 years, and on various projects of covering a range of ages from brand new greenfield projects to one built on top of a core that predates the Go language. The needs of these backends tend not to be overly complex, handling user management, payments, and a relativly simple product. They’re maintained by teams of 2-20 backend engineers and work with a SPA web frontend communicating with JSON over HTTP.

With my most recent work being mostly greenfield, I’ve been thinking more about how I can apply what I’ve learned from my colleagues working on older projects, and avoid decisions made in the name of moving fast which cause a lot of pain further down the line.

This year was, unlike the previous few, without any major travel. Although I did move from the UK to Switzerland, which did give me a new place to explore and photograph. Even with that I took a fraction of the number of photos I usually take in a year in 2020, which left me with not much to choose from for this selection. I chose to still put it together though because I like that this has become somewhat of a yearly reflection (even if it does take me the better part of the next year to put them together) and I thought that given it was somewhat of an interesting year it could be nice to have this record.

August 01 is Swiss national day, and one of the few days of the year that it’s legal to set off fireworks here in Zurich. I decided to head out in the evening with my digital camera to see the fireworks and take a few photos, primarily just for myself and maybe to put a few on my Instagram story (hence the vertial compositions). In the end I thought I had a nice little atmospheric photo series which would fit nicely here.