hughevans.dev

making

Everything I made in 2025

Revisiting 2025 through projects made.

Kafka

How I discovered pigeons sabotaging my project with Aiven Free-Tier Kafka

How I used Aiven's free Kafka tier to monitor my smart bird feeder in real-time

ghost

Migrating from Jekyll to Ghost Blog

I decided to migrate my simple static Jekyll site to Ghost Blog: a powerful open-source blog and newsletter platform.

Community

Big Data Europe 2025 Highlights

I was lucky enough to attend and speak at this years Big Data Europe event in Vilnius, Lithuania.

AI

I Built an Arcade Game for a Conference. Here's What Went Wrong

Amateur hour game dev, Faustian bargains with AI, and trying to do my actual job.

Python

Building a Stress-Sensing Stress Ball with Raspberry Pi Pico

I was given this Anaconda stress ball at PyCon UK by the amazing Dawn Wages. I think because of having spent so much time working with stress gauges earlier this year as part of my bird feeder project my first thought was “can I add a stress-sensor to this-stress ball

Community

My ATO 2025 Highlights

I just wrapped up an incredible two days at the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh, and I'm still buzzing from the experience (though admittedly quite jet-lagged as I make my way back to London for the Dremio Subsurface conference). Day Two: Finding My Rhythm I joined the

RaspberryPi

Data from Smart Bird Feeder Project

Update: After some feedback I manually relabeled my data and changed my approach slightly for better graphs By popular request here's all the data I collected from my smart bird feeder in histogram form: This is my first time trying Marimo and I really liked using it for

Community

Is Meetup Terrible or is *my* meetup terrible?

I’ve spent a lot of time and energy this year complaining about Meetup (at the CodeBar Festival Fringe, at PyCon UK, and on my blog). Meetup is becoming more expensive, less reliable, and generally ‘enshittified’ which came to a head at the beginning of this year when AI Signals,

Python

My PyCon UK 2025 Highlights

I had a great time at my first PyCon UK over the weekend: the community was really friendly and I feel like I missed as many good talks as I saw which feels the mark of a good conference to me. Day One: Highlights 🐍 I started the day with a

Data Engineering

Getting Started with Iceberg Topics - A Beginner's Guide

Understand how Kafka integrates with Apache Iceberg™ and experiment locally with Docker and Spark The streaming data landscape is evolving rapidly, and one of the most exciting developments is the integration between Apache Kafka and Apache Iceberg. While Kafka excels at real-time data streaming, organizations often struggle with the complexity

RaspberryPi

Smart Bird Feeder Part 2 - How can I automatically identify bird species from an image? - Using Tensorflow and a webcam to spot birds

In the previous entry in this series I built a smart bird feeder that could weigh birds with the goal of figuring out how heavy a particularly portly looking robin was. This only got my part of the way to my goal of once and for all answering the question:

RaspberryPi

Smart Bird Feeder Part 1 - How can I weigh things with a Raspberry Pi? - Using a HX711 ADC and load cell with a Raspberry Pi

There is a very large robin that often visits the bird feeder on my office window. It's clear this robin is much heavier than other robins because when he lands the impact makes a loud thwack sound. I decided to see if I could build a simple setup

Data Engineering

Getting Started with Diskless Kafka - A Beginner's Guide

Diskless topics are proposed in KIP-1150, which is currently under community review. The examples in this article use "Inkless", Aiven's implementation of KIP-1150 that lets you run it in production. I joined Aiven as a Developer Advocate in May, shortly after the Kafka Improvement Proposal KIP-1150:

Data Engineering

From Radio Waves to Kafka Topics - Building a Real-Time Aircraft Data Pipeline

If you want to showcase real-time data architectures you need a data source that's live, high-volume, varied, and messy enough to showcase real-world challenges. This is an issue I've run into several times over the last year whilst giving talks about real-time analytics using Kafka, Druid,

Community

What do community organisers need? Not another pizza.

Part 1 : If I never see another pizza again, it'll be too soon. The year is 2022, I am a know-nothing twenty-something cloud consultant. ChatGPT has just been launched and the company I work for has created a brand-new practice with the business to focus on AI, and

AI

Does AI actually make you more productive? Speed running my job with Cursor.

Last week at TurinTech we had a workshop on agentic AI with an unusual challenge: complete a work task without writing any code manually; the goal was to see if we could boost our productivity using these tools. I'm fairly skeptical of using agentic tools at work -

Project

Laptop Sticker Collection

My friend Leo built this cool web app for annotating his laptop stickers to record where he got them. This tickled the sticker-goblin and developer advocate parts of my brain, so I nagged Leo until he shared the source code with me. He did so graciously on the condition I

Article

Meetup is terrible now - Codebar Festival Fringe

On Saturday I had the pleasure of speaking at the codebar Festival Fringe at Newspeak House about my thoughts on the decline of Meetup and approaches for tackling platform decline in the community organising space and elsewhere. The community came together to raise hundreds for codebar and it was a

AI

How to use AI to write documentation that actually works

Writing documentation is an oft maligned part of the software development process. It takes time away from solving technical problems and can feel like an unending task., new changes and versions can make your newly updated quick-start or API reference rapidly out of date. It comes as no surprise then

Article

Everything I Made in 2024

I made a lot of things this year including mistakes - I started the year out of a job having been let go from a Senior Platform Engineer Role because I'd pursued a Senior role before I was ready. I'm now in a better place with

Article

Adventures in POSSE

Anne Fehres and Luke Conroy & AI4Media / Better Images of AI / Hidden Labour of Internet Browsing / Licensed by CC-BY 4.0 Post Own Site Syndicate Everywhere POSSE (Post [on your] Own Site Syndicate Everywhere) is a simple concept: when you create digital content like articles, guides, or videos simply upload

Article

Apache Druid Summit Panel

My last week at Imply was at Druid Summit, it was an absolute pleasure working alongside my former colleagues Reena Leone, Peter Marshall, and Dave Klein running the event and getting to see so many excellent presentations from members of the Druid community. I organized all the panels for the

Article

Aerospike Barcelona Data Management Community Meetup

I had an amazing time speaking at the Aerospike Barcelona Data Management Community Meetup this week about working with flight radar data in Apache Druid. The team at Criteo were amazing hosts, super welcoming and friendly and the audience were really engaged with great questions after talks wrapped up. I&

How to

Backup your OpenSearch indices with manual snapshots

You're making a change to your OpenSearch managed service and it's all going great - right up until you make a mistake, destroying your cluster and causing you to lose all your indices. If only you had a snapshot you could restore your cluster from? Too