Welcome to Chameth.com!

CHECK OUT MY NEW BLOG POSTS!

Hello!
I'm Chris, a software developer from the UK. That's me over in the picture.

My day job generally involves Android app development, but I also have an excessive collection of side projects.

Chris Smith - Programmer Stats
Name:	Chris Smith
Class:	Programmer
Type:	Human
HP:	929☑☑Yak Shave
After attacking, add 1d6 side project tokens to this card.☑☑Side project
Multiply all damage by number of side project tokens.

Outside of programming
My current languages of choice:
Go, Kotlin, Android
I enjoy:
video games
Recent picks: Warframe, Final Fantasy XIV, Factorio, Rocket League
reading
Some favourites: Snow Crash, Dune, A Memory Called Empire, Dungeon Crawler Carl
puzzle hunts
DIY
board games
Some picks: Cartographers, Terraforming Mars, Fluxx, Lovecraft Letter
films
Favourites: Easy A, Hackers, The Matrix, Everything Everywhere All at Once
escape rooms
and tinkering with electronics.

This website houses my blog and some other random bits and bobs. There's a full site map if you want a quick overview of what's here.

Here are my latest blog posts:

Home Automation Without the Megacorps
I first experimented with home automation in 2016, by picking up a Samsung “SmartThings” hub. It was terrible. The UI to configure things was slow and clunky, firmware updates were applied whether you wanted them or not, and everything stopped working if their cloud services stopped. You were also locked into whatever integrations they deigned to support, of course. After that broke for the umpteenth time I scaled back and for years the closest I got to home automation was a couple of Hue bulbs.

The Curse of Knowledge and Blogging
The single worst part about blogging for me is trying to come up with ideas for what to write about. Not because they’re hard to come up with, but because every idea seems too basic or not worth talking about. Seems.

Building a travel toolkit
For a while now, whenever I’ve traveled anywhere I’ve dumped a selection of tools into my backpack just in case I need them. Originally this was mostly focused around being able to open and fix my laptop if anything went wrong, but over time has slowly expanded to include other useful tools.