The blog

It’s been over a year since my last blog. I’d like to say that this is down to something interesting. Perhaps due to a period of deep meditation. Or maybe having to be ‘off the grid’ due to government agencies being after me. Sadly it’s none of these things. I’ve been working on the new […]

I’ve been playing the latest attacks in France over and over in my head. First off let me make my position on the atrocities absolutely clear. The attacks were appalling and the perpetrators got exactly what they deserved. My concern is that a line of respect and common decency has to exist if we are […]

I recently decided to sit down with my site and see what needed doing. I scrolled to the bottom and realised the theme hasn’t changed since 2010!! Despite some sniffiness from some of my colleagues at the fact my portfolio site is a WordPress blog, I decided to stick with it. It’s done me well […]

Personal projects can quickly become lost by the wayside. The initial momentum is difficult to maintain throughout the project cycle. That’s why it’s always good to consider how you’re going to manage the project early on. Part of this process should be to consider how you intend to keep the project active in your consciousness […]

Close Photoshop immediately. You are trying to run before you can walk. Have you ever just stared blankly at a completely blank PSD waiting to be hit in the face with the inspiration bat? I have and know it can be soul-destroying. The initial design phase has to exclude all detail. To force this approach […]

After a recent switch to Amazon Web Services, I thought updating my Phing build XML would be a straightforward task. It wasn’t. There weren’t a lot of resources out there for this particular scenario so I decided to write this blog piece. AWS comes with good security out of the box. This is obviously a […]

Making the leap into a complete rewrite can be a difficult one. If you can afford the time it takes and the pros out way the cons then go for it. I’ve been busy working on the latest version of my full English. In my next few blog posts I’m going to go through the […]

A frail PHPUnit suite is one thing, but one that completely crashes MySQL is something else entirely! I wanted to do a quick blog as this problem isn’t well documented and I want to save people the same pain I went through. The problem manifested on a rather large suite of tests with a dedicated […]

How do I innovate? Do I need to invent something new? How do I measure success? As a developer, I’m often looked upon to use technology to improve processes. This to a degree is innovation but you don’t necessarily need IT solutions to innovate something. You just need a good imagination. “Imagination is more important […]