Playing with Sonic Pi
I’m teaching some more 101 level programmer classes and this time we’re looking at Sonic Pi as an introduction to text-based languages after playing with... Read more
01 June 2017
Building an IIS website in PowerShell
A tiny script to create a local website in IIS just so I could test out a set of static html pages to make sure... Read more
14 May 2017
A tiny introduction to Python unit testing
As I go deeper and deeper into Python, lead by experiments with the Microbit, I thought it was about time I experimented with some tests.... Read more
12 May 2017
Determining when your Azure session has expired
Logging into Azure from PowerShell usually gets down with the Add-AzureAccount cmdlet. This pops up a UI form asking for your user name (maybe the... Read more
26 April 2017
Old-Timey Twitter for the Microbit
Teaching some maker classes at campus north this week, I was showing the students how to send and receive text using the microbit’s radio API.... Read more
19 April 2017
Old-Timey Snapchat for the Microbit
As a I mentioned in my other post from today about the microbit radio API, teaching the maker class gave me some new ideas for... Read more
19 April 2017
Lightning Calculator for the Microbit
Ahead of a maker class I’m teaching in a week or so I’ve been thinking of what kinds of things are appropriate, easy to understand... Read more
11 April 2017
How Do I Unix?
Slides for a presentation I did to some Windows-only junior devs on the joys of Linux and Unix, alternatively titled: “Unix for the Terrified”. Read more
08 April 2017
Installing .deb Packages in Elementary OS
I’ve been getting more and more frustrated with Windows 10 marketing features to me during normal running of the system (“Hi, it looks like you... Read more
14 March 2017
Being a Good Senior Dev
I saw a tweet last year from Ricardo Gladwell around what it means to be a senior dev. This stuck with me as good, concise... Read more
08 March 2017
Growing a Garden
A favourite anti-analogy I was reminded of recently which I converted into a little illustration so that I could include it in a talk. Read more
06 March 2017
Lead Time vs Cycle Time
Struggling to come up with a suitable analogy to explain the difference between cycle time and lead time when discussing #NoEstimates (again), I hit on... Read more
04 March 2017
Passing MsBuild Variables to Wix
It almost seems like it would be an easy thing to have wix (an xml file-based installer build system) see and use variables passed to... Read more
01 March 2017
Brilliant People Management with Agile
We had the pleasure of hosting the awesome Meri Williams at the February meeting of Agile North East. Read more
13 February 2017
Creating Builds in TFS 2015
05 February 2017
Building a Custom PowerShell Cmdlet in C#
Over the time I’ve spent automating deployment and build processes, I have fallen out with plain command line applications and batch files. In their stead,... Read more
30 January 2017
Having the Right Kind of Argument(s)
I saw a PowerShell script from a few days ago got me thinking about command line arguments and calling other programs from within a script.... Read more
12 January 2017
Finding Differences in Folder Content
Another contender for the department of “I might need to remember how to do this again one day”, I occasionally need to update a set... Read more
05 January 2017
Minecraft Blocks Cheatsheet
There are a huge number of block types available to build through the Python API. Read more
10 December 2016
Building a house in Minecraft
The Python API for the raspberry pi edition of Minecraft is really nice and easy to get started with. There aren’t an overwhelming number of... Read more
05 December 2016
Hello, Minecraft
I’m going to be doing some tinkering with Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi. Specifically, writing some code to do some building using the Python interface.... Read more
04 December 2016
The Big 5 of Flow Philosophy
28 November 2016
SQL Schema Generation as Code
While I was generating test data from a SQL database in the last post, I returned to another irritating part of SQL Server’s “Generate and... Read more
09 November 2016
SQL Test Data as Code
I’m a big fan of driving manual, error-prone setup steps for anything into scripts and automated tests. Read more
01 November 2016
Tiny Asteroids for Microbit
Asteroids is a game I used to love to play on the old Atari 2600 console. Read more
28 October 2016