Blog Posts

Do you like scary movies?

We're getting to that time again where hooletts and bogles come out to play, people wander the streets in fancy dress, and it’s socially acceptable to almost drown trying to bite apples. It’s also a great time to settle down, switch off the lights and enjoy a horror movie. Rather than recommending some brilliant…

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Format a Linux Disk as Ext4 from the Command Line

There are plenty of guides for how to do this online. But I end up spending 20 minutes searching every time I need to remind myself how to do it, so I'm putting it here to save me that hassle. For the code, I'm just going to assume the drive is /dev/sdb. If you're following this, make sure you're using the correct…

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Inject CSS From Your RequireJS Module Into The Main App

We’ve been doing some work on a data display app that serves as a framework for a bunch of modules. We picked RequireJS to create the app due to its modular structure and used it with a Node.js backend to build a small app that we can now create child data modules for. Each child module needs to be fully responsible…

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Using Flexi-Time Like a Boss

I'm pretty lucky (from what I hear) in that our company operates a flexi-time system. I used to work strict 9:00-5:30 years ago but it never real fit well with software development. It’s not often that you’ll get to the end of a task bang on finishing time so you find yourself either working late (not good for you),…

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So You’re a Professional Web Developer Are you?

Over the past few months, I’ve been helping out with recruitment for one of our offices by putting together a coding test and then marking the results. It’s been eye-opening. Also part soul destroying and tear inducing. At one point I stopped to look for the hidden camera, expecting a ghostly Jeremy Beadle to appear…

Use Karma and Grunt to Run Your Jasmine Tests in Real-Time

As JavaScript applications become more common and more complex, the need for good unit test coverage also increases. Hopefully you’re already writing tests. If not, why not? When I’m doing TDD with C#, I use NCrunch to monitor all tests within the Visual Studio Solution and run them as they change. This saves me…

.NET Distance Model

I actually put this together a while ago but have just realised I never put it up here. The Problem As part of some of the work I've been doing over the past year or so, we've run into issues dealing with units of distance. The most problematic of these being when an app that was created for a US market had to be…

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Amazon Prime: A Mini Review

Amazon Prime is “Unlimited FREE One-Day Delivery on millions of eligible items” that costs £49/year. Here’s a quick overview of it during my Christmas shopping experience. Skyrim: Late Ordered: Wednesday 27th November Estimated Delivery: Friday 29th November Arrived: Monday 2nd December Kingston 4G RAM:…

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Post an array of objects to WebAPI using jQuery

This is quite niche but caught me out the other day. Let’s say you have a person entity: public class Person { public int Id { get; set; } public string Name { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } } and you have a WebAPI method that takes in a group: public class UsersController : ApiController { …

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Inked

So I got a tattoo. It's been something I've wanted to do for years but never worked up the courage to do it due to a general disliking of pain. I came close to getting the band tattoo a couple of years ago but The Fear got a hold of me and I didn't bother (thankfully). But, after getting over my fear of needles (I…

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