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I am a thirty-something white, English speaking male working in tech. I feel like this simultaneously gives me every right and no right to discuss privilege.

That time of year is upon us, whether it be Christmas, 'The Holidays', Festivus, or whatever else you decide to call it. It's here, loud, everywhere and in your face. Over the past years and have liked this time of year less and less, with increasing passion, and sick of people calling me 'grumpy', 'a Grinch', 'Scrooge' and other sorted insults, it felt like time to explain my point of view and problems with this time of the year. ## What's it about? Is it about the birth of Christ? Supposedl...

What’s one of the first things you look at when trying a new piece of software? Or after you’ve hit that tempting Download button, what’s your usual next step? I will take a bet that for at least 70 percent of you, it’s the documentation that you check out next.

53,056 people from 166 countries descended on Lisbon for this year’s Web Summit. I’m not sure if this makes it the world’s largest startup event, but it’s damn big. I have attended startup events around the world and have often found them obsessed with nothing but raising money. Whilst the topic was in abundance at Web Summit, it also had enough of something for everyone, with discussions on technology, design, ethics, futurism, and more. If you’re not interested in discussion, but would rather...

I'm sat at an Apple event in Berlin and there's not many people here, which says something about what people feel about Macs vs iPhones, or something. In a week when IBM became one of Apple's biggest clients and Microsoft announced more interesting products. It feels like there is growing disappointment and boredom in what Apple is offering. I recently started a new job and have a work computer budget waiting for me and am wondering what to spend it on. I have been a loyal Mac user since 1997 a...

When I saw the announcement of the Yoga Book at IFA I was fascinated. A tablet with a proper keyboard, and a graphics tablet that I could doodle and even write on. Sign me up! I placed an order with Lenovo, realising that their online store wasn't as advanced or friendly as others I am used to. I then waited with baited breath, uncertain what I was going to receive, or when it would arrive. About a month later it showed up and I was happy to see that the package did include a 'live pen' (More...

I recently created a package for the Atom text editor that exports your markdown files to Medium. Find out how I wrote it and how you can help me improve it.

When you've spent a lot of time working on the latest great project, library, service or platform you generally would like people to use it. Whether people find out about you from a presentation, the media, internet search or word of mouth, what's the first aspect of your project that people usually encounter?

I haven't been to many meetups the past weeks as the beginning of October is traditionally conference season in tech, and as I look back through my [Timehop](https://timehop.com/) for the past years, pretty much every year around this time I am at a conference. This year has been the turn of Voxxed Belgrade (2nd time) and LinuxCon (also 2nd time). Both very different conferences and great in different ways. I'll tackle chronologically. ## Voxxed Belgrade 2016 Voxxed in Belgrade last year was by far on of my favourit...

Since 2008, many developers have focused on building, distributing and selling (or hoping to sell) their efforts in two curated, walled garden stores. The Apple App store and Google Play (and related) stores have helped developers find audiences of billions around the world. It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Some say the “app store” model has forced a race to the bottom, with prices and developer revenue share reduced, despite such large audiences.

If you’re reading this blog, then you have a rough idea of what containers are and why you want to use them. Docker has made it easy to experiment with containers, and is slowly making it easier to deploy and manage them in production environments. However, there are a still a lot of gaps in what Docker offers (for free), and others have stepped up to fill them.

This has been a week of me appearing at meetups rather than attending, and I must admit, when I present, I tend to forget what else happened. More of an adrenaline rush than egotism. I hope. I delivered an Ignite talk about technology in board games, which went well, but I think the Ignite format lends itself more to 'inspirational' style talks. I also appeared on a panel recapping new products from IFA, and added sufficient journalistic realism. I think. Aside from that I had a more relaxed w...

It's been a while since my last update pertaining to the Chip Shop board game. After realising that board games isn't that lucrative of a business, it slipped down my priority list somewhat. I also had a lot of feedback from the UK Games Expo (thanks to Carrie and Tyler for running the booth for me) to process and that took time... I am happy to now announce the release of what I will call, version 0.2 of Chip Shop, complete with a **lot** of changes. The aim to fix balance issues, make components...

The evive aims to reduce the complex tangles of sensors, circuit boards and cables you have covering your workbench. It's a compact, all-in-one small book-sized device capable of reading and outputting a variety of sensor and trigger data. Built in includes power sensors, multiple motor channels, voltmeter probes, and two analog to digital converters. If that's not enough for you, at the heart of the evive is an Arduino Mega offering large expansion possibilities with a mini breadboard, communic...

In this Weekly Squeak I cover another week in Berlin meetups and after Apples September product announcements, do they no longer like the prosumer? ## A Week in Meetups ### Reactive Programming (with Swift) First up was [a Swift meetup](https://www.meetup.com/Dubsmash-Tech-Talks/events/233449942/) covering [reactive programming](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactive_programming) with a variety of frameworks. Having heard a lot about the subject I was keen to get a more 'beginner' perspective of what Reactive programming actually is and how / when it's useful. The talks were more advanced than I was expectin...

I spent a long time researching, trying and tweaking text editors. As a cross-platform developer and technical writer (mostly writer these days) I work with different programming languages, document formats and want an editor with particular features, but that is also easy on the eye. Ideally I wanted all the functionality I was looking for in one application, not split between 5.

A few months ago I was at the Berlin Blockchain awards, and it appears that 'blockchain' is the new buzzword that startups and tech-folk like to throw into everything, without completely understanding the concepts behind it. Whether you believe that blockchain is just a new buzzword for the industry or a truly revolutionary technology, developers are often uncertain of how they can use the blockchain concept in their applications. Eris Industries' solution might make this a bit easier.

The humble but powerful Dockerfile is the building block of Docker images and containers. In essence, it’s a list of commands the Docker engine runs to assemble the image, and thus instances of images as containers.

I love Markdown and I love editing Markdown in Atom. But I also love the exposure that Medium offers, and whilst I admit it has a great editor, I like to be able to write offline and I like having a central repository (i.e. Git) of my work for collaboration, consolidation and other purposes. It turns out that Medium offer importers for Markdown and HTML in their API and inspired by the [Ulysses](https://www.ulyssesapp.com/) editor (which has a Medium export) I thought it was about time that my favourite editor had the same p...

As a (very) frequent writer and editor I often find myself writing and correcting the same words over and over again. Or in preparation for publishing I have to repeatedly undertake the same steps, such as adding short codes or formatting links. In most cases these tasks are actually a series of search and replaces, so I wondered how these could be incorporated into an Atom plugin to be triggered with one command. The plugin turned out more complex than I initially thought and is still in deve...

This is my second visit to Tirana for the OSCAL conference, an annual celebration of open source technology in Albania's capital. Aside from excellent content, the conference stands out for a couple of reasons. Most attendees and organizers are under 30, and the gender divide is pretty much an even split. Anyone who attends tech-related events in other countries know that this is (sadly) unusual, and I was interested in digging beneath the surface to find out more.

A video about new features and improvements in AppCode 2016.2 is here!

Recently out of private beta, Docker’s new native applications aim to replace the current methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac, creating a better experience for developers using those platforms.

Recently out of private beta, Docker's new native applications aim to replace the current methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac, creating a better experience for developers using those platforms. For the previous solution, Docker Toolbox used VirtualBox to create a small Linux virtual machine that hosted your images and containers. It worked pretty well but could be unreliable at times and required workarounds that sometimes resulted in unexpected outcomes or not working at all.

relayr is an IoT platform as a service, aiming to help IoT developers centralize and aggregate the data generated by IoT connected devices. By installing their hardware and software SDKs you don't need to worry about specific SDKs and data types generated by various devices, but instead code against the relayr APIs. relayr began with the Wunderbar, a custom IoT prototyping tool that provides a multitude of sensors and adapters. In May, the company released the Proto IoT Android app and I met wi...

Automate your tools with Bitbucket Automating our development and deployment processes can save lots of valuable time, especially when the tasks are fairly repetitive. Using continuous integration tools such as Bamboo, Jenkins, and Code Ship with Bitbucket repositories can save time, and ultimately, money. Automated builds and deployments can draw right from the branches of your Bitbucket repository, allowing you to set up these automated processes and then sit back and let them run. This overv...

*This is the latest editorial from my newsletter,* [*subscribe here*](https://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/){.markup--anchor .markup--p-anchor data-href="https://www.sitepoint.com/newsletter/" rel="noopener" target="_blank"}*.* A lot has happened in the past two weeks, a lot of it generated from WWDC, Apple's annual developer conference. On the surface (and the corny keynote didn't help) there didn't seem a lot to interest developers, but dig a little and Apple opened and introduced a surprising number of APIs to developers. Over the com...

Note that Otto has been decommissioned as of August 19, 2016.

Not so long ago, Vagrant was the prime tool that attempted to solve that time-immemorial problem of "it works on my machine." Developers could create shareable Vagrant files to allow coworkers to spin up replica machines for testing code and the interconnecting parts of a typical modern project. Vagrant is far from dead, but it suffers from a couple of long-lasting issues, including the resource footprint of virtual machines created, the speed of sharing files between the host and virtual machin...

I'm leaving most of this post to the podcast version as I had a co-host in the form of [Cate Lawrence](https://medium.com/u/529dde579def){.markup--user .markup--p-user data-href="https://medium.com/u/529dde579def" anchor-type="2" user-id="529dde579def" action-value="529dde579def" data-action="show-user-card" action-type="hover" target="_blank"} and we spoke for nearly an hour about Bitspiration, startups in Eastern Europe, Warsaw, WW2, IoT, Booth Babes, Europe vs Silicon Valley and much, much more.