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Do-it-Yourself Peer Review
29 November 2011
Read moreWhen I get asked about tools for quality assurance, I will pretty much always mention that the technology is not the answer. In my experience, the best improvements in quality come from process, from letting as many people as possible have access to all aspects of the system as early and often as possible.
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Explaining MySQL's EXPLAIN
24 November 2011
Read moreThe MySQL explain plan is a great tool to help developers and database administrators to improve the performance of specific queries happening against a database. It is very easy to use, but its output can be confusing, so I thought I'd show a very simple example.
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Simple CRUD with MongoDB
10 November 2011
Read moreWhen I meet a new technology, I like to experience it "just as it comes". I'm happy at the command line and I like to type actual commands and see man pages before I use any wrappers or helper tools. So when I met MongoDB for the first time, I did exactly that. This post shows those first steps of creating a database, and inserting, reading, deleting and updating data.
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Missing Kernel Source when Installing VirtualBox
09 November 2011
Read moreI'm creating a virtual machine to use for my upcoming training courses to get around issues trying to get machines set up in a hurry on the day. I haven't used VirtualBox before but since it has free clients for Windows/Mac/Linux I thought I'd give it a go.
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API Serving JSONP
03 November 2011
Read moredisclaimer: I am not a client-side developer, and I don't write javascript. However I am committed to supplying useful APIs of all kinds, and JSONP falls into this category
Early in the development of the new Joind.In API, someone else started consuming the service to populate the javascript widgets they were making*. Since these scripts are intended to be used on many external pages, and they retrieve data from the joind.in API, cross-domain issues were a problem.
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UML Diagrams with Graphviz
18 October 2011
Read moreI worked on creating some plausible-looking diagrams for representing object inheritance (this is for my forthcoming book). Since I know I'll forget how I did it, I wanted to share while I can remember!
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Ada Lovlace Day: Laura Thomson
07 October 2011
Read moreHappy Ada Lovelace Day! Today we celebrate geeky female role models, and I'm going to write about someone I consider a friend. It feels a bit strange to do so (and I didn't actually tell her beforehand), however having been written about before on this special day, I know I've never been offended by such flattery and so I hope she won't be either :)
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PHP Developer at a Python Conference
27 September 2011
Read moreA few weeks ago, while attending the delightful OggCamp, I was approached by someone asking me to speak at PyConUK. Well ...
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QR Codes with Google Charts API
22 September 2011
Read moreI'm a big fan of the google charts API - it draws much better-looking graphs than I would ever manage and all I have to do is assemble the right URL to make it work. I recently got a feature request to add QR codes to joind.in, so that speakers and event admins could easily allow people to link in to a particular talk page.
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Eleven Wordpress Plugins
21 September 2011
Read moreWhen I moved this blog to wordpress a few weeks ago, I got a lot of questions about its implementation and setup. Today I'm sharing a list of all the plugins I have enabled, with a little description of what they are and what they do.
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Movable Type Fonts and Ubuntu
12 September 2011
Read moreSince relaunching this site, with actual design rather than several shades of pink thrown together, I've become more aware of being consistent in presentation. With this in mind, I wanted add the same fonts to Ubuntu that are used here.
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Drawing Flow Diagrams with GraphViz
17 August 2011
Read moreRecently I've been drawing a few different kinds of diagrams for a book I was writing, and been using graphviz to create them. Since I struggled a bit to get them going the way that I wanted them to, I am sharing them here (as much for my future self as anyone else visiting, but if they help you too then that's excellent).