Archive
Writing
75 posts
2026
2023
The three sieves of Socrates - can the tests for gossip also filter fake news?
Famously quoted and cited as a story of Socrates challenging a friend, the 'three sieves' or the 'three filters' were intended as a way to decide whether to believe…
1 min
Git version control system cheat sheet - life of a repository
The git distributed version control tool is one of the most popular versioning tools in use in the software industry today.
4 min
Word of the day: effusive
In order to stir the grey matter, and learn a little along the way, here is the word for the day Effusive Adjective.
1 min
2021
Identiy, Users and Access: The holey trinity
Identity, Users and Access: The holey trinity For some time I have been meaning to capture a snapshot of some of the key design considerations for the identity and…
3 min
Startup ENG Rules Series. 1. Storage. Prefer Insertions to Updates
Background Over the last decade I have worked at a number of very large and very small companies, the smallest being just two people and the largest having over one…
6 min
2018
Top tips for refreshing Android skills with the Little Miracle prototype
Over the last few weeks I have been working on a prototype of a pregnancy contraction tracking app and wanted to share some tips from my experience so far.
1 min
Changing teams at Google
After spending a little over a year working with Ads partners I am now moving to a different team working with Google partners! Part of the transition involves getting…
1 min
2017
Redeploying Rediscover.Work to Save Money Part 2
Migrating to Google App Engine was more straightforward than trying to rebuild my environment and meant I had to change a few things in my setup.
1 min
Redeploying Rediscover.Work to Save Money Part 1
After five years working in startups, and more recently in 'stealth mode' startups I have decided to go back to my favourite place to work.
2 min
Wine Tasting at Majestic Camden
I recently attended my first wine tasting which was organised by my private Somelier.
1 min
Living with Android 4.* on Samsung S3
The Due to a screen fade issue with my Samsung S7 I recently had the chance to downgrade temporarily to my old Samsung S3.
1 min
2016
Discovering The Beauty of Tuscany in Italy
Italy is without exception my favourite place to visit and my last trip was no exception.
1 min
QA for the Customer
Some time ago I had the chance to work wuth a development team which had separate QA resource. The team was working in the standard "over the wall" mentality.
1 min
Recruiting Full Stack Developer
I recently joined www.parktechnology.com as the CTO. One of the great pleasures of my role is to start hiring a technology team.
1 min
Blog Draft Ratio: Should We Publish Everything
Recently I have had a proliferation of ideas about blog posts to write. The challenge is knowing which are really interesting to readers.
1 min
Random Damage
One of the hardest things to rationalise are random acts. Today I found someone had pushed my motorbike over. Unfortunately there was quite a bit of damage.
1 min
How to Apply Sales CRM to Job Hunting
After reading a number of books on sales about using technology like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools to measure and qualify your sales funnel to increase…
2 min
Fix Found for Foundation 5 Syntax error unrecognized expression
If you are using Zurb Foundation 5 and are seeing this error message: Uncaught Error: Syntax error, unrecognized expression: [data-'Times New Roman'-dropdown] Then check…
1 min
Installation Issues of Ubuntu 15.10 and 14.04 on Lenovo X1 Carbon
I recently bought a Lenovo X1 Carbon and had a bit of a 'mare' installing Ubuntu (both 15.10 and 1.04).
1 min
2015
Which is the next hot technology for full stack developers?
I am trying to compile a list of technology stacks that full stack developers are using and could in the future become part of a recognised approach like LAMP.
1 min
Ansible Destination Not Writable
This is a quick blog post FYI in case you are searching for error messages like: msg: Destination /etc/mysql/my.cnf not writable This may be caused by the need to set…
1 min
The Three Stages of Software Design Evolution
I have had a number of conversations lately with different people on the subject of assessing job candidate competency.
3 min
Sales University
In a previous post I mentioned the sales training from Rod Sloane which I attended at Google campus.
1 min
Web Summit 2015 with Upgrade Digital
In November this year I was lucky enough to be able to attend Web Summit to promote Upgrade Digital The web summit venue is truly vast.
1 min
SSL Test Certificate Bleed
Many of the people I have worked with will know of my distaste for self signed SSL certificates in test environments.
1 min
The SIMPLE Guide to Startup Sales from Rod Sloane @campuslondon
Today I was at @campuslondon and just happened to attend an event on sales for startups. The event was held by Rod Sloane.
1 min
Shopping Trip to Durham
For the last few weekends I have been visiting Durham to do a bit of shopping. It has been a long time since I spent much time in the city other than just passing…
1 min
Refactoring Bookable Resource API
One of the key principles of the design of many of the different API platforms I have built recently was to separate the model exposed to users from what is stored.
2 min
Heading Back to the UK After Four Months
After four months away with occasional trips back I am heading home to the UK tomorrow. In this stint I have been away for over 50 days.
1 min
When I said I was in need of a break I didn't mean a bone!
Unfortunately a couple of days into my second week in Mauritius I broke my right leg kite surfing.
4 min
After a Week in Maruitius
After a week in Mauritius I have still only managed to see about half of the island and haven't made a dint in my to-do list.
1 min
Mauritius Day 6: Much In Need Of a Break
Over the last few days I have earned a few bruises and some aches to boot so decided that today I would take it easy.
2 min
Mauritius: Day 5 - Kite Lesson #3 and Snorkelling
Today the wind was much better than forecast, reaching over 20knots and giving me more than enough power to get myself into trouble on today's lesson.
1 min
Estimating API / Web Traffic Load
One of the challenges facing anyone trying to capacity plan is how to estimate immediate concurrent load on the system.
2 min
Mauritius Day 4: Adding Surfing to Flying a Kite
Having pretty much gotten over the jet lag (and exhaustion) I woke a little earlier today so that I could go for a swim.
2 min
Mauritius Day 3: Kite Surfing Refresher
Today I had my first kite surfing lesson here in Mauritius, the goal was to review everything I know and get a bit of confidence and practice before the next step…
2 min
Mauritius Day 2: Discovering Kite Surfing Nirvarna and Testing Snorkelling Kit
I learned from Fuerteventura that kite surfing lessons can be hard to book due to demand so I thought I should probably get myself along to sort out some lessons.
1 min
Welcome to Mauritius
From the moment you arrive in Mauritius you are aware just how stunning a place it is, even the airport seemed to help frame the mountains in the south west of the…
1 min
Goodbye Stockholm or Parhaps Au Revoir: How To Make The Most of a Trip to Stockholm
 For the last few months I have been living and working in Stockholm, Sweden. It is a genuinely pretty city with a unique character.
3 min
Welcome to Blogger!
This Sunday when I tried to write a new post, I found, horror of horrors that my site was down! After being a loyal customer of 1and1 for years, they had disabled my…
1 min
DRYness for Cloud Formation Environments
AWS Cloud Formation opens up many possibilities in terms of creating re-usable infrastructure.
2 min
Towards Immutable Infrastructure
Building a computing platform that allows developers to focus on the application and business problems is seen as one of the key ingredients in modern technology…
3 min
2014
Suspension Setup for 2006 Triumph Daytona 675
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="520"] Two 'old bikes' - one new to me...[/caption] For those who don't know I love riding motorbikes and in the last couple of…
2 min
The Three P's of a Good Business Partner
There has been much written about how many co-founders are best and what the ideal number of co founders is.
2 min
Schema Org Naming Frustration
Standards are a great thing but some times they lead to having to make some silly compromises. Take the schema.org event.
1 min
OpenHack #3
As part of trying to learn some new technology and approaches I am going to OpenHack #3 with the objective of discussing and hacking on either: Time series monitoring…
1 min
Travel Needs an Upgrade
Over the last year I have been working as a contract CTO and one of the clients was in the travel sector, a London based hotel chain.
4 min
Could Using Bleeding Edge Tech be the Best Way to Attract Talent?
It seems that the ruby language was the tool of choice if you wanted to work on the new and shiny. It may be that Ruby isn't the new shiny thing though.
1 min
Developer Goal #1 Dry-ness
DRYness may be a design pattern you have heard of. If not; we are talking about Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY).
1 min
Adding UUID column to a Statement MySQL Replicated Database
UUIDs can be a very nice alternative to Auto IDs for keys in database tables but there is one problem with them when using statement based mysql replication.
2 min
ProtoStore UUID Storage Under MySQL
Over the last year or so using ProtoStore to handle object serialisation has saved me a huge amount of time and countless SQL related bugs.
1 min
A sad sad day indeed! Bye Bye BMX
Unfortunately I am going to have to sell my BMX. Since I moved I have found it harder to find somewhere like the awesome dirt jump track in Hackney.
1 min
2013
Blues Saxophone Lessons
I have been listening to more blues than jazz recently and started to hanker to play some on the saxophone. As usual, the first place to start was YouTube.
1 min
Getting Back Into Android
This week I am trying to get started on an android demo of the Click Date Love site.
5 min
Startup Founder's Crisis of Confidence
The chances are that if you have ever tried to do something totally new to you, like starting your own company, you have had to find away of dealing with your own fear…
2 min
Protubuf Persistence for Fun and Profit
Note: This post is about the recently open sourced proto store project as part of a SiteMorph Open Source initiative.
4 min
Falling Down
The last week has presented a lot of challenges not least being knocked off my motorbike, financial issues and a heavy crash on my BMX.
2 min
Time To Train: Coaching For Saxophone
As I mentioned in a previous post, I have started to learn the Saxophone as it was a long time ambition.
1 min
Track Day at Rockingham International Motorbike Circuit with NoLimits Track Days
This weekend for my birthday I finally managed to get along to a track day. At the last minute I managed to find a place on a NoLimits track day at www.rockingham.co.uk…
5 min
It's Time For a Little Music: Picking Up the Alto Saxophone
Today I finally started to learn the Saxophone. It has been a desire to learn the Saxophone for a long time.
1 min
Improving Image Layout with JQuery
I recently decided to start pushing more of my code onto GitHub to help other people speed up.
1 min
Startup Risk Management: Mitigate the Cost of Failure
I recently had a really nice chat with some old colleagues on the subject of the 'risk of running a startup'.
3 min
Motorbikes are The Way Forward: Yes I am Looking At You Camden Council
This weekend while at the MotoGP with my GF, she took the chance to have a free bike training taster session provided by Get On motobike training.
2 min
What Would You Do With 20 Million Dollars?
This month (September edition) of Wired UK focused on inspiration. I must admit that my pile of unread wired magazines was starting to get out of hand.
2 min
The Problem with Second Hand Vehicles
I recently purchased an 'old' FZ6 Fazer. Old, in this case being a 2005 model. I noticed a few minor bumps when I bought it but couldn't have noticed some of the other…
3 min
Time To Try WordPress
For quite a while I have been letting my personal site slip. In an effort to increase the amount of bloging I manage to get done I have decided to go for a non-technical…
1 min
2012
Site Morph at Silicon Milk Roundabout
After what seemed like a short afternoon presenting at Silicon Milk Roundabout I am left with a few feelings I would like to share: Again I was impressed by the…
2 min
PHP : The only choice for front end development?
Is it the only option? In a recent chat with a ex-colleague we were discussing how hard it might be to find a front end developer who can also use Java.
1 min
Why I am giving up my day job to run a technology start up
As some of you know I have been working on a new idea, a website called SiteMorph.
1 min
Is technical debt the Pinocchio’s nose of software engineering?
Technical debt seems like the Pinocchio's nose of software engineering; the ‘lie’ that something is finished perpetuates and causes it to multiply in size.
3 min
2011
The art of refuctoring
I recently saw @jasongorman present at JaxLondon on refuctoring. Unlike refactoring you try and reduce the readability of code to make you indispensable to your…
2 min
Open source accessibility testing library
Website testing and accessibility have been interests of mine for a while and over the last couple of months I have been supporting the web accessibility testing…
1 min
Back at the yoke
Last weekend I finally got around to taking a flying lesson that I was given for my birthday last year.
1 min
Learning to turn with the California Superbike School
A couple of weeks ago I took a training course with the California Superbike School. Before arriving I had some apprehensions but they were quickly dismissed.
1 min