* According to Wikipedia “Columbia is the female national personification of the United States.”
Within the extra-fortified walls of yet another Broadacres townhouse estate, Columbia rides her merchant bicycle, selling her wares. She gives the impenetrable security guard her usual friendly universal smile, as he escorts her in, interrogating her, seemingly knowledgeably, on her state of affairs.
There is the biblical narrative of Yossef, a man sold into slavery by his brothers, eventually finding himself as a prisoner in Egypt. As time goes by, the monarch of Egypt, the Pharaoh, has a perplexing dream, and is unable to understand its meaning. After hearing the dream, Yossef helps the king understand that a time of plenty and abundance is expected within his realm of authority, proceeded by a time of famine and drought. The recommendation of Yossef in light of this foretelling was to store up in the time of plenty, so that there will be sustenance in the time of lack.
As the red sun sets over the Northern Suburb hills, and signals the call of the moon over the darkening night’s sky, the spirit known as Debt begins its ward rounds within the plush suburbs of Fourways:
The night is young But I’m of old Looking for more to embrace In my choking hold
Beginning her regular routine of visiting the temples built to satiate her with living sacrifice, she starts off at Lonehill Shopping Centre. As dusk draws and commerce begins to rest its head, she sees James and Ayanda walking tensely to their car with a full trolley from Woolworths.
“But you know with the school fees and home loan, we can’t afford a new car”, says Ayanda to James.
“Yes, I know, but clients don’t take me seriously with this Polo. I can feel that I’m on the cusp of something good, and if I can score a few more contracts, we’ll live the comfortable life we’ve always wanted” explained James.
“You said that about the school and its supposed networks. You said that about the house and its supposed community. Now we find ourselves here living month to month, just getting by, forever on the ‘cusp of something good’” said Ayanda.
But why is she stubborn Why all the prudence Maybe a much longed for holiday May be just the influence
In the car on their short trip home, Ayanda gets a WhatsApp from Tracey. She’s suggesting their families do a short holiday during the upcoming long weekend to Bela Bela.
“It’s been a really long year, and my soul needs this” thinks Ayanda to herself. “But James will never say yes to this after I said he can’t get a new car”
Sheepishly, Ayanda says to James, “maybe I do need to support you better in fulfilling your dreams. We can move a few items in our budget around and consider getting the car I guess”.
Oh, but this one Was way too easy Surely there’s a challenge That’s more worthy
So up Debt goes into the darkening skies, hovering through the light breeze blowing against unsuspecting homes. Approaching Dainfern Square, he sees two friends, Ayodele and Oluwafemi entering a restaurant to sit down.
“It’s now been 30 years since leaving home” remembers Ayodele. “My children know very little of their history and where they come from”
“Why didn’t you ever go back?” asks Oluwafemi.
“We were so disillusioned when the promise of a prosperous Nigeria became a nightmare” replies Ayodele. “I don’t think I had the capacity to endure the thought of going through that again”
“When that oil price was good, man, it was good.” reminisces Oluwafemi. “But when those stupid IMF fools came and brought those foolish so-called ‘structural adjustments’ with their loans, man, things became bad bad.”
“Promised us dreams of prosperity. Left our country forever broken” depresses Ayodele. “And our children forever lost” adds Oluwafemi.
What a glorious reminisce Of my beautiful craft The shattered societies My work of art The night is young And I’m of old Let me find more to embrace My choking hold
How far can a name travel? How many new worlds can it see? Before the changing scents and ever-molding patterns Change its pronounced identity.
How far can a name travel? How many worlds can it see? Before the tugging blood threads from its ancestral home Start invoking their mythical nostalgic fantasies.
It’s moving day today.
How do we manage application state in Angular? What are some of the good approaches to keep data in sync between different components and services that use the data?
It’s spring time now
And the early morning birds tweet
Songs of optimism and hope
Marching into the dawn with beautiful feet
My store-front window has dated
With winter’s fashion trends
The time of protest, anger and distrust
Seemed to have come to an (un)expected end
Let me dress up my mannequins
With the colours of neighbouring outlets
For my patrons have stopped paying with clicks
Opting for next door’s sonnets
Let me drape its head with quotes
Appropriated from contexts generally unseen
Maybe it will give an appearance nouveau
And get the world to notice me
Let me give its lips a smile and song
Something that may now be hard to do
Because I’d learnt the winter dance and songs so well
And now once again I have to become something new
Yet if I don’t dress it up in seasonal vogue
They may not come inside to see
The apparel sewn by the deepest parts
The doubts and fears and hurts in polychromatic tapestry
But the more my offering changes
To match the song of the birds
The less space left inside the store
To display the original song my heart once heard
The song of freedom and beauty
The melody of glorious things unseen
The secret things that have remained hidden
Because I’ve buried them within
So let me finish dressing my mannequin
To cash in on cryptic social currency
Before it’s time to learn summer’s song
In another escape from social redundancy
The Spring Framework is great in how it provides an opinionated way to structure our applications, and because so many people are using it, it’s easy for new developers to quickly familiarise themselves with the codebase.
For those who have written unit tests in Go, the stripped down nature of the language might have produced some inconvenient duplication and seeming messiness in each test. For example, if you have a test for creating a new item, adds a generated identifier and saves in an in-memory data-store, it may look as follows:
One of the things that is most punted about with the Go language is its ease of understanding the code that has been written. The language was built to be as simple as possible, and features that the maintainers deem to be superfluous are left out. Like generics. Some view this as a disadvantage though, as it takes and increased number of key strokes and lines of code to achieve what may have been achieved by a 1 line lambda anonymous function in other languages.
