Photo of Chris Zetter

Hi!, I'm a software engineer and author from London.

More about me.

2025

What makes SQL special Posted on technicaldeft.com
rgSQL: A test suite for database engines Posted on technicaldeft.com
Booknotes: Feedback wanted and the sample solution
Booknotes: Grouping and my favourite HYTRADBOI talks
Booknotes: Web-first and making PDFs
Booknotes: Parsing and tokenization
Booknotes: Talks
Booknotes: A bag of tuples
Booknotes: Writing portable code

2023

Using the mob tool for productive pairing

2020

My cookbook
Generating random maps
Mapping anything with BSicons
Weeknotes: Lockdown activities
Weeknotes: Hair, birds and trains
Weeknotes: Lower latency
Weeknotes: Working from home more & how toilet roll is really made
Weeknotes: Magic paste and the roundest animal
Weeknotes: Double Double Helix Staircases
Weeknotes: Rebasing and Baking
Weeknotes: Festive activities

2019

Weeknotes: Moved!
Weeknotes: Nut butter top three
Weeknotes: Moving, Changing, Optimizing, Warehousing
Weeknotes: No Rainbows on the Victoria Line
Weeknotes: Flu
Weeknotes: A visit to Kew Gardens and a Baking Failure
Learning American Crosswords
Three Small Things you can do in Javascript
Using the Key Smartcard
Visualising How Rails Responds to HTTP Requests

2018

Multiplayer Crosswords
Visualising Changes to Rail Services

2017

What I Learned from Types and Programming Languages
Splitting Strings

2016

Good Design in my Kitchen
Running a Learning Hour Posted on the FutureLearn blog
Impersonating the Government
Getting a Refund

2015

Learning Cryptic Crosswords
The FutureLearn test suite
The Name of the Class
How I make animated gifs

2014

A Note to Myself: Lessons You'll Learn About Being a Software Developer
Readable feature tests with RSpec
Building a Voronoi Map with D3 and Leaflet
Visualising Supermarkets with a Voronoi Diagram

2013

Halifax, I Wish you Were Easier to Talk to
Setting headers in Rails 4
Adventures in RubyMotion: The App Store in 2 weeks
Launch images for iOS 7 in Rubymotion

2012

Keyword Arguments in Ruby 2.0
HTML CV Template
The 'bad scan arg format' Bug
Ruby Parsing Bug
therubygame Deconstruct
Build a Database Server book cover

I've just published my book - Build a Database Server. Learn how real databases like PostgreSQL and MySQL work by building your own database from scratch.

Find out more and see a preview.