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Todotxt on Android and Ubuntu
02 January 2015
Read moreI'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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Making a Play Kitchen
24 December 2014
Read moreThis 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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ZCE Questions Pack Unavailable
16 December 2014
Read moreThere 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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Status Check on All Vagrant Machines
09 December 2014
Read moreMuch 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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Vim and HTML Tags with the Surround Plugin
04 December 2014
Read moreMarking up documents is always tedious, and usually there are shortcuts available. My favourite document format tool is Pandoc, literally a box of document-conversion tricks! Today though I was not so lucky so I marked up a plain text file as HTML by hand ... or rather, using my favourite vim tricks so I thought I'd share them.
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New Job With Siftware
17 November 2014
Read moreAfter 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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Announcing the Git Workbook
21 October 2014
Read moreI'm very pleased
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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Git Submodules for Dependent or Common Code
15 October 2014
Read moreSubmodules are one of the most powerful and most mistrusted features in git, at least in the web development part of the internet where I spend my time. I've seen them go horribly wrong, but I've also had teams adopt submodules and have their development process run much more smoothly as a result - so I thought I'd take a moment out of my day to write down the process (and the gotchas) of development with submodules.
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Ada Lovelace Day: The Women Who Share My Journey
14 October 2014
Read moreIt's Ada Lovelace Day. If you don't know what that is, you can read more about it here: http://findingada.com/. Go ahead, I'll wait.
While being a woman in tech can be isolating, the women I meet along this journey make the experience what it is. I have fabulous male friends and mentors also, but today I'm focussing on the women around me. They are the modern-day equivalent of the cousins that you grow up with, share stories with, laugh and cry with. They have shared the personal and the professional, the joy and the fear. Today seems like a good time to call out some of the women that I'm so glad to have around me.
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How to Choose PHP Hosting
09 October 2014
Read moreI've been thinking a lot about the state of hosting in PHP lately, mostly as a result of working with a few different clients on their setups (including one that bought brand new hosting a month ago and got a PHP 5.3.3 platform), and also being at DrupalCon and meeting a community who is about to make a big change to their minimum requirements. With that in mind, here are my thoughts and tips on choosing hosting.
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Install CharlesProxy CA Certificate on Android
29 September 2014
Read moreI use Charles Proxy extensively for debugging all kinds of applications, and lately I've been using it more with mobile devices. One of the killer features of Charles is its ability to intercept SSL traffic. This is hard - and rightly so, it should be difficult to inspect SSL traffic!
Charles handles this by using the server's SSL certificate for the connection from Charles to the remote server, and then using Charles' own SSL certificate for the "last mile" back to your browser or device. This means that the connection will be flagged as insecure; Charles' certificates aren't trusted by your browser or device - but we can easily change that.
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Joind.in at PHPNW's Hackathon
25 September 2014
Read moreWith a week to go, everyone attending PHPNW is starting to get excited. One of my highlights of the weekend is always the hackathon; as an open source project lead it's fantastic to meet new contributors and get a chance to hack in person with them and the more established people from the project.
This year will be no exception: PHPNW's Hackathon is on the Friday evening - you need a conference ticket, and you need to tick the "hackathon ticket" box. Joind.in will be there and we've got a very big todo list so if you are looking for something to hack on, then look no further!
