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    Category: tech

  1. 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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  2. 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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  3. 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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  4. 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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  5. Git Submodules for Dependent or Common Code

    15 October 2014

    Submodules 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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  6. Ada Lovelace Day: The Women Who Share My Journey

    14 October 2014

    It'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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  7. Install CharlesProxy CA Certificate on Android

    29 September 2014

    I 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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  8. Including Code Samples With rst2pdf

    15 September 2014

    Every document I create these days is written in rst (ReStructuredText) and transformed into something useful using rst2pdf. This includes worksheets, reports, handouts and slide decks. Along the way I've learned a few tricks, and I try to write them down so I can look up how to do something. If this helps you too, then great :)

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  9. Adding Npm to a PHP Travis Project

    14 August 2014

    Like most PHP developers, I'm polyglot. My PHP project builds with phing, but uses a bunch of npm tools along the way to minify assets and those types of things. When I introduced TravisCI into my project, I was instantly confused by the requirement to specify the technology I was using ... all of them, surely?

    In need of wisdom and advice, I turned to the best source I know:

    How do people use @travisci with multiple languages? Project uses PHP and nodejs tools but I can't seem to configure both. Any links/advice?

    —Lorna Mitchell (@lornajane) May 7, 2014

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  10. My ffmpeg Cookbook

    22 July 2014

    I have been doing more screencasting lately, so I thought I'd share some recipes here, for my own future use and in case anyone else wants to use them. I capture my videos using Kazam on Ubuntu, usually by resizing my second monitor to 800x600 and then capturing that. Kinda eye-bleeding to record but looks good in playback and also works well either in tiny web view or on a big screen. I also screencapture my android device and for that I use Screen Recorder.

    Edit: I mostly used OBS for video from around 2019.

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  11. View Only Headers with Curl

    08 July 2014

    When working with curl, it can give lots of excellent and detailed information, but sometimes it is too much! Today I'm fiddling with the caching headers on a client's application, so I'm only interested in seeing the headers and not the body of the response. Making a HEAD request changes …

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  12. Video: Git Remotes and Tracking Branches

    03 July 2014

    Here's a little demo video that I put together to explain pushing/pulling with multiple remotes and how tracking branches make this easier. It's one of the chapters from my "Git Adventures" talk, but it didn't make it in to the talk in Amsterdam last week since we chose a …

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