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Scaling and Sizing with PDFJam
30 April 2015
Read moreI find myself needing to take a PDF, output it at a specific size, and have the result offset to the top right hand side of the screen. To achieve it, I needed a few new switches to my good friend PDFJam, so I thought I'd share my command!
pdfjam …
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Vimdiff and Vim to Compare Files
21 April 2015
Read moreAt the moment I'm working on a tricky project where two similar projects diverged. Very similar things happened to them both, but not quite the same things - and now we're merging the codebases to give us as much common code as possible. All this simply serves to set the scene of exactly what I was doing spending a whole day with large code diffs - I had to look up a few things so I thought I'd capture them while I can remember.
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Vivosmart Smart Watch
17 April 2015
Read moreI don't often do product reviews here, but I recommend this one a lot so here goes ... I have a smart watch, the Garmin Vivosmart. I really like it and its integration with my android phone so I thought I'd share my experiences.
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Proxy Curl Through Charles Proxy
13 April 2015
Read moreI'm working on a project at the moment with an API, so I usually talk to it with curl. I also love Charles Proxy, a very handy tool that I use to inspect, repeat and edit requests. Today I used them together!
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Test Incoming Webhooks Locally with Ngrok
11 March 2015
Read moreI'm enjoying working with hubot; I have a few different instances running for different groups. One of the things that I use hubot for is to echo activities from the source control repo, the bug tracker, the CI system, the (you get the idea) into the channel for a project. This is achieved via webhooks; a feature offered by many providers to POST information about an event to your endpoint as soon as it happens.
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Organising Inclusive Events
09 March 2015
Read moreI've been thinking a lot lately about what makes an inclusive event. Not gender-inclusive, necessarily (I commonly find myself as the only woman developer at both my local user groups), just approachable, maybe for newcomers but mostly for everyone. What happens at the event itself is really important, whether people greet you, whether the speakers introduce themselves, and so on. That's only half the story though, because often we've excluded people from our events before the event begins. Every conversation I have about this topic comes back to information.
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Hubot with Git Submodules
03 March 2015
Read moreI love hubot and use one in a few different places. One thing I do find though is that I often want to edit or evolve those plugins, and it seems somehow unethical to just hardcode my changes into my own repo. Once I figured out how to wire together a forked repo as a submodule, it became much easier to work with hubots with external plugins, so I thought I'd share my recipe for that.
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Git: upstream is gone
11 February 2015
Read moreI came across a git repo recently that output this message with every operation I did:
Your branch is based on 'origin/master', but the upstream is gone. (use "git branch --unset-upstream" to fixup)
I was delivering a workshop at the time so I kinda snarled at it and carried …
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5 Reasons to Consider Upgrading Your PHP Platform
05 February 2015
Read moreIn recent years, the release cycle of PHP has become much shorter. We now have a much more controlled and well-publicised process of releases, and moving between each version is no longer a leap of faith. The newer versions have HUGE performance improvements, great features, and better security, and the software is free to use. Yet we have a very, very long tail of PHP installations on older versions (around 75% on entirely unsupported versions at this point). Many of the companies I talk to think that upgrading will be pointless and painful, but that's not my experience of migrating PHP projects. Here are a few things you might like to think about or be aware of before you make the decisions that "not broken" is good enough for your applications.
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Gollum the Git-Enabled Wiki
21 January 2015
Read moreIn 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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Set Up Your First Hubot
13 January 2015
Read moreIt 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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My Leanpub Toolchain
12 January 2015
Read moreI 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