What's wrong with coding tests and how to do them right
Ideas for improving coding tests, and some thoughts on how we got here
by @nottrobin
Ideas for improving coding tests, and some thoughts on how we got here
This is the cream of my painstakingly curated daily diet of podcasts. I hope it might be helpful to others with similar interests.
The mismanagment of big tech monopolies is impoverishing the world. We should do something about it.
A Flow email template for inspecting all Shopify data available for a given order
I'm redoing my CV, and I've decided to use the ModernCV LaTeX template
It may not be helpful to cast all abusers as scheming psychopaths
Some guiding principles for creating platform tools for DevSecOps enablement
Software is opaque, unknowable. This leads to a lot of pretence, pressure and imposter syndrome. There are some remedies.
HTTP/3 is rolling out across much of the internet. When will one of the biggest hosting platforms get support?
Microsoft has its talons deep in OpenAI, and may become the engine of the next era of tech monopolies
These are technologies are mentioned a lot nowadays, and I'd like to know them better
What will the crypto house of cards bring down with it?
A thorough examination
Government should spend until there's full employment. Anything less is theft.
PageRank was a beautiful idea. Then nofollow ruined it.
Count the number of "characters" in a tweet, according to Twitter's character counting rules
I made a module from from code I found on the internets
Mahnke's majestic mantras
Democracy and free speech are the long game
The obvious costs of running an office-based team just couldn't be justified after the pandemic
Why I've decided to add utterances to my blog
To build a life within the chaos of infinity, we each need an anchor.
Journalism, nihilism and postmodernism.
Catching errors without thinking carefully about the user experience is an antipattern and a debugging nightmare.
Software development could do with slowing down and thinking a bit harder
I've written a GitHub action to socialise my posts every time I commit. Let's try it out.
Some principles that I hold in high regard for solving problems well in programming
GitJournal is a great way to publish to a GitHub-hosted Jekyll blog from an Android phone
After trying many ways to get around paywalls, I've landed on 12ft.io. It's simply awesome.
I've finally removed Google Analytics from my site
The contents of a talk I'm giving tomorrow on best practices for online writing
Crafting interfaces that developers love
An organised list of links to good sources of information
An overview of regex and how to use it, from a few different angles. Including appropriate warnings like 'avoid regex'.
Most sites should use "font-display: optional"
I'm trying to flesh out a scheme for realistic daily writing, in the open
Reviews of baby products we've bought over the last few years
Laying out the goals & principles for my site
Some posts I hope to write over the next few days
I had a lovely day. I'm exhausted.
Why publishing unpolished, quick drafts may be a good strategy
Building a daily writing habit
How to navigate the various zealotry about testing your programs
By default, Nginx will terminate abruptly when stopped. This can easily lead to dropped connections in production services. SIGQUIT is the answer.
Getting up and running with LXD containers - Quick usage; basic networking; sharing folders with write access
A number of techniques I use frequently for maintaining control over my Git commit history in my feature branches.
As a terminal user with a keen interest in usability, I explored my thought process when learning a new CLI tool, and made some basic UX recommendations.
Within certain networks, docker is unable to resolve DNS correctly. When this happens, here's how to fix it.
As optimising web performance becomes more and more important, it's becoming essential to carefully manage your caching headers. But Django doesn't make it hat easy.
As a web developer, it can be incredibly useful to be able to spin up a quick server to inspect and manipulate raw requests. And if you're used to working in Python, this little script is just the ticket.
The combination of the free services from CloudFlare and Github Pages make it incredibly easy to host a secure website.
I have trouble being disciplined, and it prevents my doing a lot of stuff I really wanna do.
Some common issues that I've found with setting up Vagrant boxes
I am a strong advocate of migration to the UK. I believe it's the only ethical and economically responsible position to hold.
I answer a bunch of potential questions about junior doctors and the changes to their contract.
Interesting technical talks I heard at my first PyCon.
I just discovered this one neat trick to free up RAM in Ubuntu even when my mouse and keyboard stop responding.
The NHS's 'behind the news' series attempts to provide a more accurate summary of health topics which may be inaccurately covered in the news
A report on my experience of the keynote speeches at my first PyCon.
My correspondence with David Mackintosh, the Conservative MP for Northampton (my new home) about the refugee crisis. Spoiler: We didn't agree.
A rambing thought piece on why I'm going to make a renewed effort to write more.
There are more steps than there should be to get docker running on ubuntu 14.04. I outline them here.
What a xenophobic message this sends.
Links to download and watch 'India's Daughter', which, naturally, some editorial commentary.
With the advent of HTTP/2, many front-end performance best practices will change. But we should only switch over when the browser support is there.
In my team, we often work in both git and bzr version control systems. This is a little guide about managing both together.
I often have ideas for digital projects or organisations, and I really see no point keeping them secret, so I'm going to start trying to share them here.
I state my case for why I think advertising harms society.
A fairly informal piece about the importance of understanding markup and the internet.
Ubuntu.com and Canonical.com will be showing the #InternetSlowdown banner in support of net neutrality.
How we significantly reduced the load on the ubuntu.com servers by caching location-specific download pages.
Docker is really useful for quickly trying things on different versions of Ubuntu. Here's how.
How to get completely free HTTPS (SSL or TLS) encrypted website hosting with Redhat Openshift.
A rambling thought piece on the dangers of companies having their fingers in too many pies.
This is a short description of what Agile philosophy is all about, distinct from any Agile methodologies (like Scrum or Kanban). I wrote this in September of 2012.
A bunch of best practices for PHP which I wrote back in 2012
A bunch of useful tips for programming well (written in 2012)
A piece of creative writing from my diary from last year. It's about the ebb and flow of humanity, and how life is hacking.
Recently I've been learning Python. I just found out about PEP 8 and PEP 257, which are guidelines for how to write python code. To solidify them in my mind, I'm going to summarise them here.
I recently started learning Python and Django, and so I've been working out how to setup a good virtual environment. Here's how to do it the native way in Python 3.4.
Why it's time to switch away from GiffGaff
I've been thinking about depression lately. Here are a few of my favourite stories about depression.
I believe that Universities UK were right to advise universities not to disallow events where the audience would be separated by sex, as long as there is no clear prioritisation of one sex over the other.
When I have children, I will take every opportunity I can to spend time with them. That is why I fully support the new Liberal Democrats flexible parenting policy.
Reading some legacy code today reminded me of some general principles that programmers could follow to make code easier to manage for future developers. I may have got a bit carried away...
There has been some misinformation going around about the state of our cryptographic technology following certain revelations about the NSA. I'm here to clear that up.
I was just reading a very interesting article in The Atlantic about the prospect of rewriting the constitution. It made quite a compelling argument.
The BBC reported on a fight and stabbings in Nottingham, but quoted the sensationalist and misleading comments from the club owner. I object.
I just discovered the unix linkchecker tool. It's a very useful and thorough tool for checking websites that more people should use.
My review of Down and Out: My first review of anything ever, this is my opinion of the Cory's first novel. I hope someone finds it useful.
A little personal wondering about how my blog's going, what I would like it to be, and how to make it so.
Some up-to-date and public Analytics data from seethestats.com: unique pageviews over time; unique visitors over time; visits by browser; visita by country; visits by operating-system; visits by depth
A rant about how the most popular online video services get buffering so very wrong by not allowing the user to control it.
Including your fonts inside your CSS files as Data URLs can help with performance
How me and some friends of mine arrived at a set of moral guidelines, and why it was so inspiring for me
Why technically proficient editors, bloggers, and especially web developers, should all use static site generators for their own sites
I spent a while working out why comments stopped showing up on my blog posts. I eventually discovered the cause and worked out how to fix it through the Disqus URL map tool.
Why you shouldn't commit binary files to a distributed version control system - and how you can remove them completely if you do.
Here's a unix command to create a GitHub repository from the command-line. You can even set it to be a git alias, for even more convenience.
How to fork the Symfony 2 standard PHP project and install dependencies locally using Composer on Ubuntu
A little brain-dump about my passions and how it all adds up to absolutely loving the internet and everything it stands for
Mini scripts are super-helpful in magento development. This will explain how to bootstrap them and give a simple example of how to select a category and get its children.
This is a full repost of the Daily Mail article by Richard Littlejohn. The Daily Mail have removed the post, but I think it should be available for people to read and judge for themselves.
The story of how I bought an iPad from photodirect, but when I tried to send it back, they attempted to cheat me of my consumer rights. I also explore the rights consumers have under UK Distance Selling Regulations.
Chrome ruined my day by introducing a serious breaking change in the update to v25. The HTML5 input date type is likely to display wrong.
How I discovered the Uservoice in-site feedback widget, and integrated it with Github Issues using Zapier
The arguments for dropping support for IE8 in your website
How TalkTalk absolutely delivered on their promise of shockingly bad customer service
An exploration of how to achieve the ultimate optimal font-size and spacing.
Learning all about Aaron Swartz after he committed suicide has made me (like many others) want to do more for the Open Access movement. Where do I sign up?
... if I had the time (this list will grow)
A list of things I'd like to learn and achieve in technology.
Introduction to Marcello's code workshops at Session Digital, and the principles of BDD and Simple Design.
An introduction and exploration of my blog's purpose.
An email I sent to Avaaz in opposition of the their stance against David Cameron on the press.
Now that Chrome Developer Tools and Firebug support Sass debugging, CSS pre-processors have a viable future.
If your Vagrant machine crashed and when you force kill it, vagrant forgets about its existence - here's how to fix that.
Download my paper "Micro-generation schemes: user behaviours and attitudes towards energy consumption" (Stedmon, Winslow and Langley) for free.
Many sites use Gill Sans. Here are some suggestions of how to use it for free.
The steps necessary to get TMUX ssh-agent correctly configured.
Vagrant installation on CentOS is a tad unreliable. Installing with Ruby Gems is the answer.
An email I sent to Avaaz to express my opposition to one of their campaigns.
Introducing an open-source mailer script written in PHP and hosted on Github.
Some examples of how to mitigate issues with managing SVG icons in mark-up.
Some examples of responsive layouts
A useful application for JavaScript Closures - passing object context.
A simple PHP command-line script for importing data from a CSV file into a MySQL database.
Some (slightly contentious) general rules for writing good CSS.
A dynamic post containing all my ideas for blogs to write some-day.