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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.

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.

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.

Automate your tools with Bitbucket

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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 machine, and the speed of making configuration changes to virtual machines.

I'm leaving most of this post to the podcast version as I had a co-host

It's a sobering time to be a mobile developer, with both app and device sales down. Personally, I feel this is just the maturation of a new(ish) industry, and everything will work out eventually. But, noticing major dents in their revenue, the major players are clearly worried.