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.
2019 was another active year for me, with a trip to Venice in July and then a
long trip to Barcelona, the U.S, Vietnam, Thailand but mostly Taiwan. I only
shot colour film in Vietnam and Thailand so those won’t appear here, and my film
from Thailand was actually the first film I’ve posted to a lab due to running
out of chems and Corona, and they were annoyingly lost before they made it
there.
I was recently looking through all the photos I took during my 4 years living in
Nottingham to see if I could come up with some kind of series out of them. After
cutting it down to all the black & white images that turned out reasonably I had
just over 200 photos so I needed to come up with some more specific ideas. One
theme I tend to shoot a lot is where nature meets the built environment, which
lead me to put together this series. I got the title, and some inspiration, from
Robin Friend’s Bastard
Countryside (watch this
video for a good introduction).