Recent posts

• The Partially Dynamic Web
  

  Moving on from Hugo to a custom website service for my own blogs
• Building OCaml on Haiku
  

  Some brief notes on building OCaml on Haiku.

  
• Self Hosting - 2024 edition
  

  A look at how I've tried to take ownership of my presence on the Internet, with a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly.
• Tiny Code Christmas - part 2: learning OCaml and that demos are mostly functional
  

  A look at learning OCaml via this year's Tiny Code Christmas, and how functional languages turn out to be well suited to old-school demo effects.

  
• Tiny Code Christmas - part 1: making coding fun through constraints and community
  

  A look at what Tiny Code Christmas is, and why it's a good path to some exploratory coding.

  
• More on Icons
  

  Another look at how icon design has changed for the worse over the last couple of decades, and my own attempt to let my personal computer be a bit more personal again.

  
• Pandas vs Efficiency
  

  Why pandas and python make me frustrated: looking at how the promise of simpilicity comes with hidden costs that are expensive to deal with, and what we might do about that.
• Why using Slack is bad for GeoTIFF Rasters
  

  Understanding what goes wrong sometimes when I send geospatial data to my colleagues via Slack.

  
• How to update a Tezos Smart-Contract
  

  Software updates are as innevitable as death and taxes, yet smart-contracts are designed to be immutable. This article takes a look at how we can reconsile these two world views for the Tezos system.
• The ups and downs of consistent icon design
  

  A bit of a rehash of the 'modern icon design is bad' trope, but something that I find very frustrating with modern app design.

  
• The ups and downs of consistent icon design
  

  A bit of a rehash of the 'modern icon design is bad' trope, but something that I find very frustrating with modern app design.

  
• Yirgacheffe: trying to do The Right Thing with geospatial data
  

  Reviewing a geospatial library I've been working on view the lens of Richard P. Gabriel's 'The Right Thing' vs 'Worst is better'
• Hypercard teaches autosave
  

  How the Hypercard manual had to work hard to undo ten years of computer habits with autosave.

  
• Working with Tezos Smart Contracts as a software engineer
  

  I've recently been tasked with maintenance of 4C's Tezos smart contracts: taking them from research project proof-of-concept to something ready to deploy. Here's my notes on how to work with Tezos as a software engineer.
• Building search with Server-Side Swift
  

  Some notes from my first experiments in writing a light-weight server-side Swift project, as I build a search-engine for my various websites.
• Sharing code in multi-target swift package
  

  How to make a SPM project that contains multiple executables using shared code, without adding another project.
• Processing geospatial data at render time on GPUs using Shaders
  

  Taking the batch processing I was doing with geospatial data in the last post and instead doing the same visualisation in real time on the GPU using shaders.

  
• Some notes on processing and display geospatial data
  

  A look at how large geospatial datasets are stored and processed, some tips to quickly see what's in the files, and how to get such data onto an interactive webpage map.

  
• How to quickly get some test code on the Internet
  

  Somethings you really just need to test an idea quickly, and here's how to do that using Docker and Azure.
• 4C starting notes
  

  A look at one of my new projects, putting my engineering skills towards a project tacking the ongoing climate crisis with a team at the University of Cambridge looking at verifiable carbon offsetting.
• Some thoughts on minimal computing, or my slow evolving 2021 side project
  

  I've been doing a bunch of reading and playing in the space of minimal computing in my spare time, and here's some thoughts on things I find interesting in the area.

  
• Bytes not Bytearrays with Django please
  

  A quick look a unexpected nuanced interaction of Django's HTTPResponse object and Python's type system that caught me out.
• Getting started with fuzzing your Django web app
  

  A small tutorial on how to run the Atheris fuzzing tool against your Django apps API to try find untested code paths.
• The tale of the software and the sartorial incompatibility
  

  Not all software issues are in the code, here is a tale of how what clothes I was wearing impacted how well my app worked when used in the real world!

  
• Easily developing webservices locally in a production like environment
  

  A note on how you can use devcontainers to let you directly work on your code base in Visual Studio Code within a full dockerized production-like stack on your local machine.
• Your next Linux distrubtion: Windows 10?
  

  How using Windows Subsystem for Linux has changed how I work, letting me use all the development tools I'm used to from linux, and still run all those other apps I need to run a full business like Adobe Creative Suite.

  
• Working with Wikibase from Go
  

  A review of working with the MediaWiki Wikibase API, and the Go library I built to make it easier to work with.
• Failure strategies vs Swift optionals
  

  How I disapproved of forced unwrapping optionals in Swift in general, but have made my peace with the existence of the operator in practice.
• Encoding and decoding polymorphic objects in Swift
  

  Some notes on trying to keep the flexibile approach to data-structures within the safety net of a type-strict language like Swift.

  
• Be wary of timestamps for Windows Performance Monitor data
  

  A look at what seems to be an unsolvable issue with Windows Performance Monitoring - it stores the events without a timezone reference but using daylight saving aware times.

  
• A simple UI for managing local docker instances
  

  A simple macOS status bar item that lets you quickly manage your running Docker containers.

  
• Better testing for golang http handlers
  

  A write up of the testing pattern I use for Go http handlers as I've not seen this technique documented anywhere else.
• Fretboard design generator
  

  I made a small open source tool that lets you generate fretboard designs ready for laser cutting or CNC routing based on MakerJS.

  
• Managing GOPATH for multiple projects with direnv
  

  A quick tip on using the direnv project to make it easier to manage multiple Go projects without sharing your GOPATH.
• Handling golang third party dependancies robustly
  

  One of the current weaknesses of Go is how third part libraries are managed, in particular how they depend on third party services, which is not ideal for production build systems. This is a write-up of how I've solved this for one particular project at Bromium.
• Some thoughts on Golang
  

  Having used Go to ship a major project for the first time, here's a summary of what I found its strengths and weaknesses to be, and why it was the right tool for this particular job.
• Discovering things too late: Quartz Composer edition
  

  A look at how powerful Quartz Composer is for quickly putting together a networked display for our home.

  
• Oculus Rift experiences
  

  I finally got some hands on experience using the Oculus Rift, and here's my thoughts on what works and what doesn't.

  
• Moving to Windows Phone
  

  Some notes as I make the switch to a new mobile platform after many years using and developing for the iPhone. A look at some of the good things and frustrating things about Windows Phone 7.

  
• Why I moved to Hockey App
  

  After hitting some issues with TestFlight, I've moved my developer testing work over to HockerApp.
• Changing roles
  

  I'm excited to be starting my next project, heading up the OS X team over at local startup Bromium.
• Culture Hack East - June 16th-17th
  

  An interesting upcoming event, at which we just happen to be speaking...
• Tickets goes retina
  

  We've added retina support to our iPad based Lighthouse project issue tracking software. Here's a write up of how we did it.

  
• Automating your build numbers with Xcode and git
  

  A look at how to automatically set your version and build numbers in Xcode from the output of git describe.

  
• PlaceWhisper 2.3 released
  

  We're pleased to note that PlaceWhisper 2.3 was release to the app store recently. A small update to our favour located content creation tool, but it has a couple of changes in it we thought we should discuss.

  
• Putting stylus to screen
  

  A look at a new stylus for the iPad that I recently bought to replace the one I made for myself, and a look at the app that I use it with the most, Paper.

  
• Cocoa OAuth 2.0 libraries
  

  Some notes on finding a usable Cocoa library that lets you build OAuth 2.0 support into your iOS apps.
• Tickets 1.2 in the app store
  

  We released another update to Tickets, our iPad app for managing your projects in the online bug tracking platform Lighthouse, bringing it up to 1.2.
• User experience versus Developer Experience
  

  Some thoughts on a trend that seems to happen far too often: software being optimised for the developer's experience rather than the user's experience
• Tate Trumps Anywhere
  

  A look at another app we worked on last year, Tate Trumps Anywhere, where you can now interact with Tate Modern's game wherevere you are.

  
• A new year, a new look for PlaceWhisper.com
  

  A look at PlaceWhisper's 2.1 update, with a new look, collections, and embeddable maps for the web.

  
• Christmas treats from Hide & Seek
  

  A christmas time release of a book that I helped a client turn into an app.

  
• Tickets 1.1 is out!
  

  Tickets, our Lighthouse based issue tracking app for the iPad, has crept up to version 1.1. There's no new functionality in this release, but it does represent a big leap forward in terms of performance for those of you with large projects.
• PlaceWhisper 2.2 update
  

  Over the weekend PlaceWhisper 2.2 quietly slipped into the app store. It's a sort of mixed bag releases, with a number of small changes to different aspects of PlaceWhisper, so we thought we'd quickly run through them with you.
• PlaceWhisper - more than a mobile app
  

  A look at PlaceWhispers companion website, designed to let you access all your location based text, images, and audio when at your desk.

  
• Tickets made faster (in many ways)
  

  It's been barely a week since the last update to Tickets, our iPad client for the Lighthouse issue tracking system, was released, and now here's another update already to give it a good performance boost!

  
• PlaceWhisper 2.1
  

  We're happy to announce the PlaceWhisper 2.1 update is live in the app store, which fixes a bunch of issues for iOS 5, and incorporates a bunch of user interface improvements based on feedback from users, trying to make it easier to explore the world around you.

  
• Mocking up
  

  A look at some of the different things I use to make mockups.

  
• Some update updates
  

  Some quick update news for both PlaceWhisper and Tickets.
• The Story Behind Tickets
  

  A look at the story behind our latest app Tickets: where the inspiration came from, and how it was an opportunity for us to both learn some new skills whilst solving a real problem.
• Tickets
  

  We're pleased to announce Tickets, an iPad client for the excellent issue tracking webservice Lighthouse.

  
• Creating a city guide for friends with PlaceWhisper
  

  In this post I'll give a detailed look at how you can use PlaceWhisper to create a phone based city guide for when people come to visit.

  
• Welcoming PlaceWhisper 2
  

  After much work over the last year, we're pleased to announce the launch of PlaceWhisper 2! Join us as we take a look through all the exciting new features we've added, including stepping beyond just the phone.

  
• Taking stock
  

  Reflecting on the passing of Steve Jobs, and trying to understand what that means for my work and where I am in my career.
• Using TypeKit with Cappuccino
  

  Some notes on how to integrate TypeKit fonts with a Cappiccino based web app.

  
• Watch The Water
  

  I'm excited to announce there will be a bit of Digital Flapjack at the Edinburgh Art Festival this year, in the form of Watch The Water, an ambient audio work contemplating the gothic soul of the streets.

  
• Come join us for fun and games
  

  If you're in or around London's Southbank on the evening of Thursday 4th of August then come join us as we re-run our locations based game set in historic London at Royal Festival Hall as part of the Hide & Seek Sandpit event!

  
• Using nib2cib with Xcode 4
  

  How to use Xcode 4 to generate xib files for use with the Cappuccino web framework.

  
• Unit testing for Google App Engine with Python
  

  I recently inherited a python project that used Google App Engine, and didn't have any unit tests setup, which is something I wanted to fix. Here's how I went about it.
• Quiz Buster 1.2
  

  Despite working full out on our next major thing (more soon!), we slipped out another point update to Quiz Buster, bringing it up to 1.2.
• Quiz Buster 1.1 update out
  

  We were fortunate enough to have some great feedback on Quiz Buster 1.0, and we took as much as we could and put out a quick 1.1 update.
• Quiz Buster!
  

  Today we're pleased to announce that our fun little question answering app, Quiz Buster has been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch.
• Migrating themes from Xcode 3 to Xcode 4 developer previews
  

  Instructions on how to take one of the important bits of your developer experience from the old to the new.
• Visualising software development projects
  

  A video showing how work evolves on a shipping iPhone app.
• Drawing on the iPad
  

  How I built my own iPad stylus.

  
• Adding OAuth support to ASIHttpRequest
  

  After a lot of dog fooding, I finally have released my branch adding OAuth support to the excellent ASIHttpRequest library.
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