Category Archives: tech
Hubot and Slack
- Hubot will not respond to you in PM, you need to join a channel and then
/invite @hubot
and your bot will join you in that channel and then respond when you address him/her by name - When configuring channel names for slack (I use the gitlab plugin which needs a GITLAB_CHANNEL environment variable), do NOT include a
#
at the start of it if you use slack – works a treat in IRC, but skip it for slack. I spent quite a while looking for a bug in the slack adapter before I figured this one out so it’s written here for me to look up next time! - Also note that your hubot can only speak in channels that it has joined; I have seen hubot actually crash when asked to speak in a channel that exists but which isn’t known to it.
I think this central way of having plugins which can integrate with many messaging platforms on one side, and integrate with many external APIs on the other means we’ll be doing much more in chat ops moving forward. Already I’m impressed by how many of the hosted tools I use have webhooks, although there aren’t hubot plugins for all of them (yet!).
Todotxt on Android and Ubuntu
- 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. Continue reading
Status Check on All Vagrant Machines
It turns out that (since vagrant 1.6) you can ask vagrant to tell you which of its machines are running, using the command:
vagrant global-status
Where did all my system resources go? Now I know!
Vim and HTML Tags with the Surround Plugin
Continue reading
Announcing the Git Workbook

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. Continue reading
Git Submodules for Dependent or Common Code
Ada Lovelace Day: The Women Who Share My Journey
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. Continue reading
Install CharlesProxy CA Certificate on Android
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. Continue reading