Paul Boag has recently posted an article titled “Do people see you as a roadblock?” that includes some very nice mentions about me. So in a shameless act of self promotion I’m going to link to it. You can read the article at https://boagworld.com/dev/do-people-see-you-as-a-roadblock/
I’ve been using Codeception for some acceptance testing recently. The project has a large database and using the standard Codeception database module that rebuilds the entire DB from an SQL dump was too slow. All I needed to do was run a few queries to put some tables into a known state. I made a helper module that will run all .sql files in a directory. I’ve put the DbHelper on Github and hopefully it will be useful for others. ...
At Headscape we were recently contacted by Brian Lewis from Modules Unraveled Podcast to see if we would like to appear on the show to discuss our use of Drupal. It was really great to have a chat with Brian and there were a few questions sent in by Twitter users who were watching the live stream. You can listen to episode 90 on the Modules Unraveled website.
I have been working for The Marine Biological Association for close to five years now but the time has come to move on. I’m very proud to say I will be working for Headscape where I’m sure I will learn lots and continue to progress as a developer. In the five years since I started the web and my skills have progressed exponentially. It’s been fun and nostalgic to talk about the early days and see how far the sites and applications have come since I began working with the MBA. ...
The short review would be “what a brilliant book”. I had tinkered with Node.js before but in a bit of an unstructured fashion. Reading the table of contents had me impressed then seeing the price for the Kindle version confirmed the deal. There is a lot of information here for very little money, around £7.50. The book begins with an introduction to Node and setting it up. There are also some details about the difference between browser JavaScript and some APIs used by node. ...
I recently discovered Shop Talk, a live web design and development podcast by Chris Coyier and Dave Rupert. So I’ve been listening to the old episodes and in episode 9 with Ethan Marcotte. Andy Howells from the UK asked a question ,which is 15:38 into the episode. He asked about an eCommerce site that could have twenty four additional images of a product and rightly expressed concerns about page load speed on mobile devices over slow network connections. ...
This year I’m lucky enough to be attending Future of Web Apps London 2012. I’ve been to Future of Web Design before and found it hugely inspirational so I have expectations for it’s more technical sibling. I’m looking forward to # Jeffrey Zeldman – Obviously a major influence in the web world and I’ve heard he is an amazing speaker. Bruce Lawson – I’ve seen Bruce speak at FOWD and he is very engaging as a speaker and I admire his honesty and openness on standards. ...
A recently got to do a small bit of work with an old friend from university. We both did the Surf Science & Technology course at Plymouth Uni and have since independent got into the world of building websites. Made By Richard had a client, Sugar Shoes, using Tradingeye e-commerce platform. I’d never used Tradingeye before and found the documentation a bit sparse . I only had to implement functionality to change the text on the homepage as well as upload new images for an image slider on the homepage and with a bit of poking around I got my head around how the system work. ...
Designing For Emotion by Aarron Walter and published by A Book Apart was a great read with some compelling case studies and examples and on how and when to use emotional design elements. All release by A Book Apart and short, sharp and too the point. This release is no exception and once I began reading I was hooked and finished it off within a couple of days. The writing style is enjoyable and educational with a sprinkle of dry wit where appropriate. ...
Do web developers really take holidays? Or are our breaks from the day job just an opportunity to catch up on some reading and tinker with some side projects? We haven’t even hit Christmas Day and I’ve managed to finish off two books I’ve had on the go, this one and PHP Master: Write Cutting-Edge Code from SitePoint. On to business, I love the A Book Apart releases and this one is no different. ...