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Working With Sorted Sets in Redis
09 February 2017
Read moreI work with a bunch of datastores and I probably shouldn't have favourites - but if I did, Redis would be one of them! I used the sorted sets in something I was building and remembered how much I liked the feature so here's a quick primer on what it is and when it can be handy.
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One-Line Command For Newest OpenWhisk Logs
01 February 2017
Read moreOne of my current project uses OpenWhisk, which is an open source serverless technology stack. IBM has it on their Bluemix platform, and since I work there, I get to play with it as much as I like! One thing that did seem clunky is that it takes more than …
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Exclude a Directory when Grepping
26 January 2017
Read moreAs a developer-of-another-discipline who is now transitioning into a bunch of NodeJS projects, I grep a LOT. However I am usually only interested in the code in the project at hand, and not the dependencies - of course grep has a switch for that! To grep your project and not the …
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Amazon Lambda Deployment Workflow For Alexa Skill
23 January 2017
Read moreI mentioned in my post about creating a new skill for Alexa that I found the workflow quite clunky. Having tried a bit more and bugged a few people to find out how they hadn't killed anyone trying to develop with a workflow like this, I have some tips to share!
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Updating Local Git Repos When Upstream Moves
09 January 2017
Read moreThe scenario: the "main" repository of a git project has changed, either an organisation rebranded, a project got a new maintainer, or a fork became the acknowledged master. In Subversion, this was the svn switch command and git has an equivalent. It's relatively easy in git to change your upstream - once you know how - so don't be tempted to just delete your local repo and re-clone! We can do better than that :)
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Lorna's Bluemix Cheatsheet
19 December 2016
Read moreI work for IBM which means I get to play with Bluemix, their cloud platform. I use this mostly from the commandline as the tools are great and I find it the easiest way to work - but I keep having to look up the commands I need so here's my cheatsheet covering the stuff I use the most. It's here for me to refer to easily but if it's helpful to you too, then great!
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Surviving Git Submodules
13 December 2016
Read moreI'm a fan of submodules in git, but sometimes it seems like I'm the only one! After having worked with this approach on a few projects, I'm coming to the conclusion that, like so many other things, it's easy when you know how! So, I tried to take my handwavy explanation of how to work with submodules, and turn it into a handy diagram for you ...
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Presentation Help Office Hours
02 December 2016
Read moreWhen I joined IBM this summer, one of the things I was most looking forward to after years of being self-employed was having a team around me. Well, that team continues to meet my expectations on that front but there's one thing we do as a team which really stands out for me - and which I think others could replicate.
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The RETURNING Keyword in PostgreSQL
17 November 2016
Read moreThe RETURNING keyword in PostgreSQL gives an opportunity to return from the insert or update statement the values of any columns after the insert or update was run. I mentioned this in passing in a few of my talks that touch on PostgreSQL recently, and it often gets twitter comment so here's a quick example of the RETURNING keyword in PostgreSQL. The newest releases of PostgreSQL are excellent and I'm seeing many teams considering moving their traditional MySQL setups over - this is just one of the extra goodies that you get when you use PostgreSQL! Let's look at an example.
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Vagrant and Ansible for Dev Machines
25 August 2016
Read moreWith my new job came, of course, lots of new projects. They cover quite a wide range of system requirements and so I've been creating ansible-provisioned vagrant machines for each one to make it easy to set up on other platforms. I thought I'd share some examples of my setup, in case anyone is interested, but more importantly so I can swiftly look this up when I start the next new project!
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Use Ngrok Dashboard from VM
17 August 2016
Read moreI'm a huge fan of ngrok, a tool that allows you to open a secure tunnel from your machine to the outside world to enable testing APIs and things. Mostly I use virtual machines for development, but by default the ngrok dashboard is only available when requested from the machine …
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Zap to Schedule Adding Todo List Items
21 July 2016
Read moreI won't admit to being a productivity nut but I am a pretty busy person :) I manage my tasks with the excellent TodoTxt system which is a simple line-per-task textfile that lives in dropbox and can be accessed by all my various devices (I'm usually a linux/android user). One use case that I've never really had a solution for is when I need to do something, but not now.