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  1. ZCE Preparation Pack

    02 February 2015

    tl;dr version: the ZCE Preparation Pack is now available from Leanpub https://leanpub.com/zce costing $30.

    I've been running a preparation course for the Zend Certified Engineer exam for many years now.  Once upon a time it was possible to buy a pack of sample exams and I …

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  2. Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki

    21 January 2015
    In trying to get company documentation off google docs and people's laptops and into a more useful format, I have been researching developer-friendly tools for business documentation. Requirements went something like:
    - must handle words and documents
    - should be available locally, bonus points for revision history
    - must publish to the web, and ideally be editable there
    - should accept content in markdown
    - must have access control (which wiped out my original plan of using a static site generator)

    While I worked on this, we were using the wiki feature in GitLab ... which pretty much hit the nail on the head. Further investigation showed that the wiki feature in GitLab (and indeed in GitHub) is a ruby gem called Gollum.

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  3. Set Up Your First Hubot

    13 January 2015

    It took me far too long to get my first hubot working; when I finally sat down to get it going the process was much easier than I expected! So here's a little guide in the hope that this helps you get started too.

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  4. My Leanpub Toolchain

    12 January 2015

    I have a couple of books (so far!) published on Leanpub, and I often get asked by aspiring authors how it works. Everyone's tools will be different, but this is what works for me

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  5. Hubot and Slack

    08 January 2015

    I'm enjoying using hubot to integrate services very easily and both give updates and respond to commands in chat. One of my hubots chats to us in slack rather than in IRC, and there are a couple of gotchas that I wish I'd known about before I started!

    • Hubot will …
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  6. XHGui on VM, Storage on Host

    05 January 2015

    I'm doing some performance tuning on a project at the moment and my favourite tool is still XHGui - but it's designed to run on the same machine as its victim and since this is a vagrant VM, the chances of me destroying the machine and therefore the data are pretty high! Instead, I set it up to store the data onto the host and I thought I'd share how I did that.

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  7. Todotxt on Android and Ubuntu

    02 January 2015

    I'm a big fan of good tools, however struggle to find products that fit me because there are some key constraints:

    • I use Linux (specifically Ubuntu 14.10)

    • I don't use a pointing device. At all. If I can't use a tool from the keyboard, I can't use it at all (as a side effect, I use keyboard enablers in my browser so if your website has "helper" keyboard shortcuts, I probably can't use that either)

    • My other devices (phone, tablet, work phone) are all android

    Taken together, this makes finding tools a challenge - but I've had good experiences with todotxt and the ecosystem around it.

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  8. Making a Play Kitchen

    24 December 2014

    This Christmas, a little girl in my life receives a play kitchen of her very own, handbuilt just for her. It was a fun project and I thought I'd share it (and the pictures, of course!).

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  9. ZCE Questions Pack Unavailable

    16 December 2014

    There is a change in legislation for selling digital goods to anyone in the EU, and to cut a long story short this means that my ZCE Questions Pack will be unavailable at least in the short term. The pack is intended for anyone preparing for ZCE, it has general …

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  10. Status Check on All Vagrant Machines

    09 December 2014

    Much of the development I do these days uses vagrant machines to make sure that my code is running in the correct environment. This is great, but spinning up too many machines at once can rather stretch the resources of the computer you're running them on - and I keep starting …

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  11. New Job With Siftware

    17 November 2014

    After 4 years of working independently, today I start my new job! I'll be Principal Developer with Siftware, a small development agency specialising in project rescue, migrations, and generally being excellent at things that need business-conscious development skills applied to them. They're UK-based but distributed; I will still work mostly …

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  12. Announcing the Git Workbook

    21 October 2014

    I'm very pleasedtitle_page to announce the immediate availability of my new book Git Workbook, costing $20 from LeanPub. This is a book that you "do" rather than "read"; it's a series of chapters (30 ish so far) each covering one specific git skill.

    Each chapter includes an explanation of the skill in question, followed by a hands-on exercise so that you can work through the skill yourself, and ends with a tickbox so you can keep track of how far through you are. It has quizzes, diagrams, mildly amusing stories, and as many other examples as I could think of that could help anyone to take in this technical topic and understand how to apply the techniques covered.

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