6 Jun 2024
At Arena Online, our plan this year is to begin migrating our existing legacy codebase off Rails 3 and into a modern Rails 7 app; simultaneously shedding over a decade’s worth of technical debt.
31 Oct 2023
Most start-ups fail. Intuitively, they fail because they run out of money. But what’s the biggest reason for this? The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries, speculates it’s because too many companies build the wrong product for the wrong people. He goes on to extoll the value of the MVP (Minimal Viable Product). MVP is the basis for discovering what matters to your audience.
16 Aug 2023
I find myself inside pull requests a lot at work. Whether I’m authoring one myself or reviewing a co-worker’s, I’ve become pretty familiar with the Github PR screen and what makes a good PR review experience. So here’s my top tips to improve your PRs.
3 May 2023
Interviewing has to be one of those universal activities no one enjoys. Whether you’re the interviewer or the interviewee, there’s a shared dread involved with being on show for 30, 60, 90 minutes. I’ve come to learn being on both sides of the fence that an interview is as much an audition for the company as it is for the prospective employee.
18 Apr 2023
I recently wanted to make a change to the fitness page on my site. To hide football activities from appearing in run data, in my code there is a rudimentary check that rejects any run activities logged on a Monday (when I regularly play football).
13 Mar 2023
In part one, we used a script to setup to sync our transient Letterboxd RSS feed to Google Sheets for some permenance. In part two we'll look into reading this spreadsheet and outputting the data onto a page using Eleventy. Then we'll take a look at the underlying class doing all the work: CachedSpreadsheet.
1 Mar 2023
I like watching films, and I like keeping track of what I watch. I’ve done this for some years via Letterboxd, a decent little app for accomplishing this task, including reviewing what you watch and keeping a to-watch list.
I wanted to integrate with Letterboxd on my website so I could “own” my reviews in case the service went kaput. That lead me to 2 options: integrate with their API, or consume the personalised XML feed URL they provide.
23 Feb 2023
Two big issues plague software development teams, and funnily enough they can seem at odds to each another. The first, the more obvious, technical debt. Old code that’s grown stale and probably wasn’t written by anyone still working on the codebase. No one’s sure what it does or whether it’s still necessary, but it still “works” and certain tests require it to be there to pass.
10 Feb 2023
I first heard about Derek Sivers when I read his first book, Anything You Want. It’s a wonderfully simple and short book where he talks about his journey from musician to entrepreneur, in the building and eventual selling of his e-commerce business CD Baby.
20 Apr 2022
I’m pretty new to 11ty, and I’m figuring things out as I go. One of those things recently was cache busting my CSS. I’m by no means an expert in front-end development, but I figured it couldn’t be that hard to add a fingerprint hash to my CSS files to ensure changes are always pulled in by the browser when viewing my site.
21 Mar 2013
A suitably ambiguous title I know, but it will become clear soon enough. On a slow evening earlier this week, after a brief perusal of the latest goings-on on Twitter, I found myself on the 37signals website. More specifically, reading their free downloadable "Getting Real" book. Flicking through it, I stumbled upon a brief excerpt from (I assume) a book called The Pragmatic Programmers. This particular page caught my attention the most.
20 Mar 2012
It's been some time since I've had to produce a design from scratch. In my day job I'm mainly a back-end developer, and recently I've been getting my hands dirty with the command line and a little sys admin duty. I'm occasionally tasked with putting together a page, to produce a visually pleasing combination of elements. This, I have no problem with. I've noticed lately though, that my ability to simply sit down and produce a design from scratch has been lacking.
4 Apr 2011
After a rather long time, I've finally finished a stable version of the CMS I've been building for the past 6 months or so. As it turned out, the first website to be built using it was a rather tiny portolio website for my good friend and upcoming artist extraordinaire Thomas Fox, which, whilst clearly and concisely displays Tom's artwork, doesn't show off the strengths and flexibility of the CMS framework.
4 Jan 2011
I've been rather busy the last couple of months having a go at building my own PHP CMS, modelled on the MVC design pattern. At work, I'm currently using a rather large, feature-stuffed home-baked CMS, brewed in-house by our PHP freelancer. Learning the ins and outs of this system over the past 6 months has inspired me to have a go at building my own. Two months later and, well, I'm still working on it. But I like to think it's certainly getting there.
6 Oct 2010
It's taken me far too long to figure this bug out, but I'm pleased to announce I've finally nipped it in the bud. For as long as version 2 of this blog has been in place, the timeline hasn't always worked as it should. To summarise, for those who haven't noticed, clicking on a date in the timeline that should show the blog(s) posted on that day, often came up with "0 entries posted on..." - when clearly the timeline shows otherwise.
22 Sept 2010
When learning the ins and outs of web design, after learning the obligatory HTML and CSS, the next logical step for most is learning a server-side language; the most popular choice being PHP. PHP opens up the possibilities of what can be acheived on a webpage and often bridges the gap between web design and web development for most.
31 Jan 2010
The new design has finally arrived. And it took longer to implement than I thought it would. I will update this message tomorrow when I'm thinking more clearly. There are a few things I'd like to introduce about the new version. There are a few bugs I need to iron out, so if you catch one - please give me a shout (leave a comment). Thank you!
26 Oct 2009
Flash Forward just keeps getting better and better. Made by the guy who made Lost I hear? Well he must've figured things out since then. Namely, how not to lose the audience's attention with a snails pace storyline. With that said, I love Lost. Ha!
17 Oct 2009
I'm ashamed to say as of yesterday I am officially a Bejeweled addict. More specifically, Facebook's app Bejeweled Blitz. I warn you, do not get into this. It will take over your life!
15 Oct 2009
I've been working on my Javascript coding more recently. It's baby steps at the moment because a lot of it baffles me. Mostly due to the fact that there isn't any error feedback. If there's errors in your code, the script just doesn't run. How convenient.
22 Sept 2009
I was surprised to see in my website stats that the last 2 days has seen large increases in hits. I have been updating a few things here and there, including the new Comments page so I can't be sure if something isn't quite right in the back-end coding of the site, or whether the site has just seen an increase in visitors over the last few days.