Welcome! I'm Lorna: engineer, author and speaker. I'm a Developer Evangelist and I love technology and sharing technology with others. On this site you'll find my blog and links to all the other things I think you (or I) might need to know about me - my opinions are my own and not those of my employer or any other organisation. If you'd like to get in touch, I'd be delighted to hear from you.
From The Blog
23 Jan
2020
Instant Test API Platforms with Prism
I've been writing a bit about OpenAPI lately and I realised that I didn't share how I'm creating local, test versions of production APIs to work with while I develop new client code or test SDK features. The recipe is simple: you will need an API spec, the excellent open source tool Prism and an HTTP client. Mix it up and be ready to change your API development workflows forever. Continue reading
15 Jan
2020
Grab Annotations from a PDF with pypdf2
If you've noticed a lot of PDF content around here lately, that's because I work with PDF a lot! Most of all, all my slide decks are in PDF and in the last year or so I've started using speaker notes in my presentations. Yes, this means that if you saw me speak in the first ten years of my speaking career, that was without speaker notes.
There are some situations where I don't have access to my speaker notes. Usually this is a good reason, such as I have mirrored my displays so I can demo or play a video without fiddling with my display settings in the middle of a talk. Sometimes, it's because something bad happened and I'm presenting from someone else's machine or a laptop that's completely off stage and I only have the comfort monitor. For those situations I use a printed set of backup speaker notes so I thought I'd share the script that creates these.
28 Dec
2019
Raspberry Pi SenseHat Night Clock
I recently upgraded my smartwatch and the new model needs charging daily (whether that's really an upgrade is a separate discussion!) so I drop it on the charger by my bed overnight. As a result, I can't tell the time if I wake up in the night which is only annoying because I don't know if it's midnight or if the alarm is going to go off in ten minutes! So I made myself a colourful fuzzy time clock with a raspberry pi and a SenseHat that were lying around in my office. Continue reading
