Sam Partington

Practical tips on environmental sustainability for software developers, frequently updated. Topics covered include infrastructure, compute, removing unnecessary code & content, storing less, transferring less, and helping your users to make a difference.

An article I wrote for the GitHub blog in 2021 on "How GitHub uses code scanning to increase developer happiness, and how you can too."

Academic paper published in the proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents. Joanna J. Bryson was my co-author.

This paper was based on my dissertation, which was published as a Technical Report by the University of Bath.

I also got co-author credit on POSH Tools for Game Agent Development by Students and Non-Programmers, published in the proceedings of CGAMES06.

Why Behaviour-Driven Development is more than just natural-language end-to-end tests. This article was featured on HackerNoon.com in 2018, although their latest redesign messes up some of the formatting of older articles, hence me linking to the Medium version above.

If you change the version of a programming language that your software requires, which semantic version number should you bump? Featured in PHP Weekly newsletter in 2018.

Using automated tests to define the contract with a third-party supplier of an API.

Encouraging tech companies to donate to software projects they use, and to involve their employees in that process.

The "missing manual" for Google's Natural Language API with Python (as of 2016). This article was mentioned on Google's Cloud Platform blog (search for "White October").

A how-to for Python's Flask framework, published in 2019.

How to reframe inexperience as a positive when starting a new role. Originally posted on the Lead Developer conference blog back in 2015.

This isn't a complete list: Much of my online writing was only on the deceased White October Blog. I may in time rescue the best of that from the Internet Archive and add it here too.

Presented at Oxford Geek Night in January 2024.

An introduction to Design Patterns, and how programming in Ruby can give a different approach to using them. Presented at Oxford Ruby User Group (OxRUG) in 2023.

What I look for when reviewing code

My colleagues at GitHub have been kind enough to comment favourably on my code reviews, and I've noticed that I often pick up on things that others don't mention. This "live demo" code review (hence no slides link) walks through some of those things.

An introduction to Unicode and what it means for PHP development. Presented at PHP Oxford in 2018.

BDD != Gherkin, so what is it? (*)

A mini workshop at the Cukenfest Unconference in 2019. There weren't slides or a detailed writeup, but I tweeted a picture of the brainstorm the attendees came up with.