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2016 was quite a year for technology and its impact on the world. Subconsciously or not, nestled amongst the booths of generic Chinese handsets and app marketing companies were many projects and people at MWC that sought to accomplish something more meaningful. Here are some of the themes and concepts I feel will shape 2017 and 2018.

Python is a wonderful language, ideal for beginners, and easy to scale up from starter projects to complex applications for data processing and serving dynamic web pages. As you increase complexity in your applications, it can be easy to inadvertently introduce potential problems and vulnerabilities. In this article, I will highlight the easiest to miss that can cause the biggest problems, how to avoid them and tools and services that help you save time doing so.

There are currently two major issues and trends with application development. One is users finding your efforts, and the other is then making money when they do.

After using macOS for over 20 years I was interested to get new perspectives and try other operating systems in my daily work. In this second part, I spend a month with Linux.

Drawing my short series to a close (we’ve talked about testing code examples in documentation and automating spelling and grammar checks in documentation), let’s cover one of the hardest elements of documentation to create and keep up to publishDate: screenshots.

Android finds itself in interesting times. Google has begun creating it’s own ‘premium’ versions of the operating system (OS), Cyanogen have ceased development, and many feel that Android will change name or shape in the near future.

Creating a modern and feature-rich mobile app has never been a simple task, but is now more complex than ever. There are a plethora of platforms, programming languages and strategies to consider, and knowing where to start and what path to follow involves understanding and appreciating a lot of interconnected components.

After using macOS for over 20 years I was interested to get new perspectives and try other operating systems in my daily work. In this first part, I spend a month with Windows.

Last year at IFA I came across a small stall lurking within a gathering of startups. The booth was full of blinking small blocks, motors and switches that aimed to help children learn to code.

2016 has been an eventful year in many, many ways. I don't want to dwell on big global topics in this post, but review what I got up to.

In my last post, I covered how to improve the written component of your documentation with automated spell-checking and suggestions for better writing. In this post, I’ll cover the code component of good documentation; trying an example and finding it doesn’t work is a sure-fire way to annoy a reader.

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.

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 just network and party, you will also have a full schedule.

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.

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 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 for the past years, pretty much every year around this time I am at a conference.

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.

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...

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, communication module (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and XBee), IC, SPI and Serial pins.

In this Weekly Squeak I cover another week in Berlin meetups and after Apples September product announcements, do they no longer like the prosumer?

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.