Another random discussion in our regular coding dojo led me to think about representing individual playing cards and decks of cards in python. Playing cards... Read more

Infection is a multi-player game that can be played using the radio to model the spread of an infection through a population. I couldn’t find... Read more

Radio on the microbit is one of it’s best features for interactivity between learners. Here I’ll show a couple of examples of using the radio... Read more

Here’s a quick solution to the balanced parentheses kata. The problem statement is: Read more

Turtle graphics are a time-honoured way to teach algorithmic thinking and are supported in regular python. Read more

Building on the Motor and BitBot classes, I decided to build a remote control for the bitbot so I can drive it using the radio... Read more

Racing fleas is a fun pastime, especially when those fleas are actually microbit pixels and no harm is done to actual fleas. Let’s build a... Read more

For Christmas last year (I know, a long time ago), I got a BitBot as a present. This is a small robot - motors, lights,... Read more

I’m teaching another course of ‘Coding for Absolute Beginners’ using the BBC microbit and python to explain what programming is, what it looks like, how... Read more

The 100 doors problem statement is: Read more

Tetris is one of those addictive games that seems to have been ported to nearly every hardware platform. I haven’t been able to find a... Read more

Today I spoke at DDD North for the third time, this time on Mob Programming, the how, where and why. Read more

Clearing out some old projects from years ago, I came across a console app that uses AIML bot, an open source project to build a... Read more

I’m starting a small but slightly ambitious project, around integrating several bits of technology that I’ve never had fully working together so in the spirit... Read more

Running an Azure classic cloud service, which at the top level is a big while(true) block, one sometimes needs to run an action sometimes and... Read more

Today, after some frustrating debugging IIS and rewrite rules not matching what was expected, I learned that IIS can log out the match process and... Read more

A new tool (to me) is ngrok a command line tool and online service to allow you to map an external url to a local... Read more

Just in time for Halloween, here’s a ghost detector that uses the microbit temperature sensor to sense changes in ambient temperature - which we all... Read more

It’s been a while since I posted a microbit sample so here’s one that would work well on the set of Jurassic Park, a dinosaur... Read more

Lots of c# unit tests I see build up a set of abstract base classes to allow for things like setting up common environments and... Read more

PdfSharp is a lovely library that lets you generate/draw pdf documents programmatically. I used it to generate some notepaper and found it easy to work... Read more

Again with the large codebases. Along with many other problems, it can be difficult to see what physical binaries have been created or copied when... Read more

If you have a lot of .Net code, projects and solutions to build, it can sometimes be difficult to see the order that the projects... Read more

I wanted to mention a couple of awesome walkthroughs - one old, one newer - dealing with a subject I always find fascinating, writing interpreters... Read more

Project Euler Problem #1 is listing all natural numbers under 1000 and summing those divisible by 3 or 5. Kind of like a maths fizz... Read more

A common problem with many c# codebases I see is a lot reliance on static classes and developers who say “we can’t unit test our... Read more

A silly little snippet you could use with the microbit and an external speaker to make someone think there’s an old Nokia mobile phone ringing... Read more

What’s programming without an occasional Harry Potter/Minecraft mashup? In the Harry Potter universe, a Portkey is a magical teleportation device which is disguised as an... Read more

We can build very simple trees programmatically in Minecraft by stacking blocks together using wood-y and leaf-y materials. Read more

Another in the continuing series of requests for slowness. Read more

I first read about the Core Protocols way back in the early 2000s from Jim & Michele McCarthy’s book “Software for your head”. Read more

I think I had mostly forgotten about lots of little features in Visual Studio, like code snippets. Today I was updating some unit tests from... Read more

The Raspberry Pi Minecraft API has a little known function for reporting which blocks “Steve” has hit/mined as he moves around the world. Naturally enough,... Read more

Another simple minecraft game, this time using Pythagoras’ theorem to work out distances between two points. Read more

A super simple rain simulator creates blocks at random positions in the sky and lets them fall to the ground under minecraft physics. Read more

Running up to a new Maker’s week at the end of July, I was getting a bit bored with the tamagotchi example that uses the... Read more

Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again. Read more

OOP to me means only messaging, local retention and protection and hiding of state-process, and extreme late-binding of all things. It can be done in... Read more

If you don’t tell people why, they’ll make up their own, much worse stories for why. Read more

One feature of the microbit I haven’t explored too much in the past was the music module. This module lets you play simple tunes using... Read more

I find it fascinating how much of what the popular programming imagination thinks of as new and exciting was already been thought of a long... Read more

One of the features missing from the pi version of Minecraft is the survival mode, where early on in the game you have to build... Read more

If you were a millionaire, living in a minecraft-kind-of-world, I’m sure you would want to have an enormously ostentatious fish tank for your block-shaped tropical... Read more

Here’s the result of a recent junior dev coding dojo, tackling fizz buzz in a totally new language for us - elixir. Read more

You periodic reminder to stop implementing code as fast as possible and slow down, maybe write a unit test or two :) Read more

Here’s a reason I like to teach unplugged or paper and pencil computer science concepts from the start. Read more

I was due to give a talk to some educators about using the BBC microbit in the computer science syllabus and was having a hard... Read more

Another example of cellular automata that I’ve only just discovered is Langton’s Ant. Read more

Another small bit of code, similar to blinkenlights, that turns on a random pixel then lets it fade out before turning on the next one.... Read more

I’ve written earlier about creating a custom MsBuild task in C# and building it into an assembly that we can load during a build. An... Read more

A tiny snippet of code often used when the microbit is not showing anything specifically on the screen but you want to indicate that something... Read more

I am usually a big fan of Tfs and VS TFS 2015 onwards and the improvements the team made to the build system as compared... Read more

Following hard on the heels of the last post, I decided to try to implement one of the other canonical examples from the MicroPython world,... Read more

In the last 12-18 months of coding for the BBC micro:bit I tended to shy away from the block-based, Scratch-like environments and have always used... Read more

So far with this personal site, I have stuck to the bog-standard way of putting all blog post content into markdown files in the “posts”... Read more

Here’s a lovely hand lettered sign from the wall of the “Honest Shop” in Coniston village, Cumbria. Read more

Having exhausted everything there is to do with plain old Python, the Raspberry Pi, BBC micro:bit (ok, maybe not :), one area of Python that... Read more

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

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

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

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

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

There are a huge number of block types available to build through the Python API. Read more

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

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

Asteroids is a game I used to love to play on the old Atari 2600 console. Read more

Conway’s Game of Life is a programming classic used in katas, to teach TDD ideas and even features in the annual code retreat events around... Read more

I saw a tweet from @TechForLifeUK the other day which said they were going to run a code dojo where they would be writing the... Read more

After getting a little more familiar with the BBC Micro:bit I decided the best way to learn something about the true capabilities of the platform... Read more

I finally got my hands on a BBC Micro:bit and have been really impressed with the user experience so far. Read more

I had been looking at some alternative programming languages, like Sonic Pi Processing and Scratch when I remembered a little game I created way back... Read more

More on complicated build systems. This time, I was attempting to make the complicated build faster by removing work that only needs to be done... Read more

Tonight, I’m doing a presentation at our local NE Bytes developer meetup on using Machine Learning in Azure to improve customer experience. The talk abstract... Read more

Soundex is a text encoding algorithm designed to create hashes of words according to their sound so that similar sounding words can be matched even... Read more

A sign on a back road in Far Sawrey in Cumbria but also serves as a periodic reminder to stop and reflect more. Read more

ISO 8601 date and time format is something I find the best format in logs and file names but can never keep the magic format... Read more

Another one from the department of aide memoire. Here’s the basic process to follow when creating a simple PowerShell Cmdlet in C#. Read more

A while ago, I blogged a quick console application to create a blog post outline, given a set of command line options. That was in... Read more

It’s great news that my favourite cloud CI service, Travis CI now supports C# directly. Read more

Another from the department of uses-the-syntax-so-infrequentyly-I-nearly-always-forget. Read more

Being a programmer, I’m often tempted to crack open a compiler when faced with a task that involves anything to do with computers. Read more

If you’ve ever installed any software for Windows using an installer wizard, you will no doubt have experienced the mild annoyance of filling in ticked... Read more

Whether your build system was developed by Heath Robinson or you simply may want it to look like it was, you can generate files on... Read more

Ever since I switched over to github to host my NDifference project I have been missing CI builds and looking for something better than running... Read more

I’m posting this older code example of a simple evolutionary algorithm to get it off my hard drive :) Read more

A part of the implementation of the NDifference project is finding similarities between pieces of code, specifically finding the closest match between several candidates for... Read more

Writing documentation in html for processing into help files with tools like Sandcastle and Sandcastle Help File Builder means that it’s easy to get links... Read more

Lately I’ve been working on some code that will delete a hierarchical list of files from Azure blob storage. Read more

I’ve been playing about with OWIN and Katana recently and was pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to get up and running serving static... Read more

One of the many parts of my sketchnoting process that I took from Mike Rohde’s Sketchnote Handbook is scanning the finished sketch in black and... Read more

I’ve been moving some code away from depending on RestSharp and moving to the new System.Net.Http.HttpClient in .Net 4.5 to improve security (and that’s another... Read more

It’s a common complaint in writing software in general and one of the difficulties in starting an open source project is coming up with a... Read more

I love working with Jekyll and Github to produce this blog as if it were software. One of the things that helps with usability, I... Read more

Here’s a neat solution (that I totally stole from Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi ) to a problem that I sometimes run into when writing longer or... Read more

Not your line manager, obviously. I mean your Manager classes. Read more

Another snippet to remind future-me (and maybe future-you) how to use a nice command line parsing library I just discovered called NDesk.Options. Read more

Here’s a script to zip the contents of a folder. Again, this is posted more so I don’t forget but hopefully someone else will find... Read more

It is only recently I realised you can use Windows environment variables in your msbuild scripts. If you want to allow overrides of build settings... Read more

Here’s a neat snippet to add to an msbuild script to import all scripts in nested sub-folders rather than hard-coding each one. Read more

I have an on-going project to trick myself into learning Ruby by accident. Read more

One of the great ways to prevent bugs creeping into your code during development is to use contracts and assertions for what you know is... Read more

MsBuild version 4.0 introduced two new Target attributes: BeforeTargets and AfterTargets. Prior to v4.0 if you wanted to run some tasks before or after a... Read more

It’s often the case that you need to extend your normal build process. To copy files into place before a build. To make files writable... Read more

Being a good programmer, I am told, is all about being lazy. So, I got bored with creating posts by hand and wrote a little... Read more

My mp3 player tends to accumulate sub-folders in my podcast folder as my podcast app syncs with it and podcast episodes come and go. Rather... Read more

Another entry from the “Combatting Not-Invented-Here Syndrome” department. Read more

Simply because I always forget the syntax for this, here’s how to recursively copy a set of files from one folder to another using the... Read more

I often need to include a timestamp in a build, either in naming a file or folder produced during the build, or using it in... Read more

Writing custom tasks for MsBuild often involves handling files and folders. These are commonly coded as ITaskItem properties in your task so they are accessible... Read more

After struggling with writing a suitable html parser, I began to feel uncomfortable that I was solving a problem that had already been solved by... Read more

Creating customs tasks for MsBuild is relatively easy provided you follow a few steps. Read more

One of the things I love about xUnit.net is how small the feature set is while allowing you to extend it with the minimum of... Read more

Here’s a small sample using NAudio’s midi file processing classes to write a simple set of notes to a .mid file. Read more