Development

Over the past year I've been slowly building a list of gotchas, mistaken assumptions and potential slip ups that have hit projects I've been involved with several times, or seemed so blindingly obvious after the moment that they just had to be documented. This is one of the many articles I have that may grow over time as I discover more useful tidbits.

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A few weeks ago I quit my job, I&rsquo;d been there for two years but it was no longer right for me anymore.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;m not one to rest on my laurels, so what&rsquo;s next? After a process of figuring out who I am and what I want to do, quite a lot is on the horizon, allow me to introduce you to some of the potentials&hellip;<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Wrapping up my involvement in Green Renters</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">This has been something that Cate and I have been trying to do for a while and we realised it needed more focussed work than we initially thought and we&rsquo;re weighing up quite what shape this will take, if you&rsquo;re interested in knowing more about that, <a href="https://greenrenters.org/news/time-new-lease" target="_blank">read this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Starting a new cooperative organisation</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The shape that this will (possibly) completely take is yet to be decided, but I&rsquo;m resurrecting and changing an old tag line from my past and starting a new Community development and Technology co-operative business called &ldquo;Large Gregarious Mammal&rdquo;, if you&rsquo;re interested in that or want in, <a href="https://largegregariousmammal.com/content/introducing-large-gregarious-mammal#overlay-context=" target="_blank">see this blog post</a>.<p class="p1"><strong style="line-height: 1.538em;">Writing more</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Wether it be on the very blog or on other more established publications, I want to write more&hellip; About technology, ideas, other people&rsquo;s ideas and&hellip; My book&hellip;<p class="p1"><strong><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">The Lean Agile nonprofit</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">I&rsquo;ve mentioned this before, but I&rsquo;m stepping up working on my timely and needed (at this time) volume (but also consultancy, blog etc&hellip;) on applying lean and agile methodology to the non profit world. <a href="https://theleanagilenonprofit.com/" target="_blank">Follow those exploits here</a>.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><strong>Tools for Changemakers</strong><br /><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Inspired by the reception from my sessions as part of the Chagnemakers Festival I have decided to turn it into an ongoing project, not only more such sessions, but also a website resource that will weigh up and review tools suitable for Changemakers.<br /><a href="https://toolsforchangemakers.com" target="_blank">toolsforchangemakers.com</a><p class="p1">Or I might just get a job&hellip;

<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">A strange session tonight as we had a last minute cancellation, this coupled with the typical business session audience, i.e. High RSVP, high no-show, meant it was a quiet and quick evening.<p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Andrew Skinner confessed to not being a confident public speaker, however this didn&#39;t detract from his high quality, high content presentation. The presentation covered getting client / internal team buy in for developing apps and Andrew drew from his years of experience working with some high profile clients and projects. His practical take homes was an explanation of Business canvases for developing business models and how to use them.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Andrew via LinkedIn - <span class="s2" style="line-height: 1.538em;"><a href="https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307" style="line-height: 1.538em;">https://au.linkedin.com/in/andy2307</a></em><p class="p1"><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Cameron Burns took a very different approach, being from a marketing background, throwing away his planned talk and just seeing what the audience were interested in. He covered sources of funding, choices of development stacks, using remote development teams, marketing plans for your apps and much much more in a quick fire sequence of tips and advice.<br /><em><span style="line-height: 1.538em;">Connect with Cameron via LinkedIn - https://au.linkedin.com/pub/cameron-burns/21/71/629</em>

I&#39;m always a bit behind with development trends, mainly because working for yourself or small businesses, you rarely have the luxury of spare time to experiment and tend to<span class="Apple-converted-space">&nbsp; stick with what you have to get the job done.

I am currently open to opportunities for full-time and part-time work. Ideally with an enterprising startup or with a larger agency or internal development team.

Not so long ago, many of us were satisfied handling deployment of our projects by uploading files via FTP to a web server. I was doing it myself until relatively recently and still do on occasion (don't tell anyone!). At some point in the past few years, demand for the services and features offered by web applications rose, team sizes grew and rapid iteration became the norm. The old methods for deploying became unstable, unreliable and (generally) untrusted. Read more

In this video we'll look at understanding the differences between Android devices, system versions and the components that comprise the Android Operating System.

Android Studio is now the official IDE for Android development. In this video we look at how to download and install it, tour the interface and look at some of the tools and features it offers.

Android development uses the popular Java programming language. In this video we look at the basics of Java and the additions that Android brings to it.

Attend any tech-related event or read any tech-related article over the past 18 months, and you will likely have heard of Docker and have an inkling of what it is and does.

Note that this post has been updated as of October 20, 2016.

Call me old-fashioned, but I have always preferred using a desktop app suited to each purpose. I feel that if all I'm going to use is a browser for everything I do, then why have a 'proper' computer? On a practical level, I travel frequently and am generally 'between' internet connectivity or using unstable internet connections, and 'real' applications are typically far better at allowing effective offline working.

Many of us start our Docker journey pulling images from the Docker Hub with the time-honored docker pull command.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m sure we’ve all been there. That moment when you realize that important and sensitive access details have leaked online into a public space and potentially rendered your services to unrequited access. With the ever-growing amount of services we depend on for our development stack, the number of sensitive details to remember and track has also increased. To cope with this problem, tools have emerged in the field of “secrets management.” In this post, I am going to look at Docker Secrets, the new secrets management feature available in Docker 1.13 and higher.

Released earlier in 2017, Docker’s new native applications for Windows and Mac replaced the older methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac and created a better experience for developers using those platforms.

Chat bots are everywhere. Suddenly our messaging services are inundated with small automated systems inhabiting spaces in the domain of human-to-human communication. We can now have conversations with bots that help us buy products, book travel, make meetings, solve customer service issues, and much more.

HashiCorp is a company that feels like it’s always been around. Quietly plugging away just out of the limelight working on awesome products and every now and then releasing something groundbreaking that you wondered how you worked without it. I attended a couple of meetups recently that covered HashiCorp tools and felt the time was ripe I dug into all they have to offer a CI workflow.

The Docker API has allowed for a plethora of options for interfacing with Docker, your containers, and images to emerge from CLIs to desktop applications and web-based management tools. I am a fan of graphical user interfaces and thought it was time to survey the current landscape of GUIs for interacting with Docker.

I will assume you are at least familiar with the concept of microservices — loosely coupled services that provide discrete solutions to business use cases that you can combine to solve current needs and demand. The architectural pattern has gained popularity over the past years, and although not everyone is completely sure what “doing it right” looks like, it’s a concept that suits modern needs and is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Before we begin, note that this post isn’t intended as an introduction to GraphQL. For a beginner’s guide, I suggest Derek Haynes’ Codeship post or howtographql.com.

Back in my Docker hosting post, I noted that deploying and orchestrating containers live was still a missing step in the Docker workflow for many developers. A handful of complex orchestration tools entered to fill the void, with large cloud companies offering to host your setup for you. In that post, I intentionally avoided tools that sat in the middle of this process by helping you to deploy containers to cloud services, but there are plenty of them, including Docker’s own official cloud service. There is still plenty of opportunity for similar services and less than a month ago, I heard of a new option, Kontena.

As Apple and Microsoft lose enthusiasm for their desktop operating systems, will it be time for Linux to shine? Or do Linux enthusiasts even care about winning the desktop war anymore?

The world and its dog has gone crazy for blockchain (and related technologies, which is a whole other post). The past two years have been a hype roller coaster for the technology with stories of equally insane valuations, technical proposals, media exposure, regulatory nightmares, frauds, and unrealized dreams.

In the past week, Berlin has hosted two high-profile blockchain conferences: DAppCon and the Blockchain Visionaries Summit. Click here for some of the highlights.

Do you litter your code with "TODO" keywords so you'll remember to come back to them? With this handy GitHub bot, you'll never have to remember again. Maybe.