What I Learnt Building and Selling My First Application

What I Learnt Building and Selling My First Application

Tuesday, Feb 13, 2018
There is a lot of discussion around the amount of money that is inside the tech industry. Although there is money to be made it is not without the trials and tribulations of selling software. This is my story of selling my first application and some of the lessons learnt. Although this was not my first built application, it was the first application that I built without request from clients. ...

Read more
What I Learnt from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen

What I Learnt from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen

Sunday, Nov 12, 2017
It has been a while since I returned from DockerCon Europe in Copenhagen, and despite doing a presentation 4 days after arriving home for Docker Cambridge meetup group, I haven’t yet done a blog post for it. However, that is about to change. So, here is my review of DockerCon Europe. Overall, what I love to see in software is passion and ideas around everything. I remember feeling how exciting it was to be involved in a massive open-source project like Drupal in 2011 at DrupalCon London and to me it seems that Docker is around the same stage of growth now (in terms of number of attendees), however, its potential as a software solution is far different to Drupal. ...

Read more
Docker DevTools: Docker as part of your development toolset

Docker DevTools: Docker as part of your development toolset

Wednesday, Jul 26, 2017
The use of tools seems to have exploded in the past few years. Simple web applications take 5 tools just to build and more complex setup are even more prevalent. Add to that that we also end up configuring our tools to better suit our needs and you are faced with a big dependency problem. How do you manage those dependencies? My most recent answer is Docker. It’s not easy for developers and users to use tools Tools were invented to make doing tasks easier. ...

Read more
Tidying Docker Containers and Images without Filling Your Disk Space

Tidying Docker Containers and Images without Filling Your Disk Space

Tuesday, Jun 13, 2017
Docker. You know that I love it. I guess maybe sometimes I love it a little too much because on some of my test servers I have been filling up a lot of GB with new images and containers. All of which hang around indefinitely if you don’t clear them. Add to that if you have a continuous integration pipeline that builds a new container every time you do a commit/push and you have an ever growing disk of redundant Docker containers and images. ...

Read more
Digital: The Stack and The Roles

Digital: The Stack and The Roles

Sunday, Jun 4, 2017
The most recent buzz word around is digital, however, it is often used as a catch all term for almost anything that is related to computers. So, what is the scope of digital and where do different roles exist inside the landscape? Generally speaking, I term digital to be anything that uses the wider Internet, however, that does not mean anything that is networked. So, simply accessing a file server is not using digital services, however, using a web application to access a file server is. ...

Read more
Why Coding Standards? The answer may surprise you.

Why Coding Standards? The answer may surprise you.

Friday, Apr 14, 2017
TL; DR. Coding standards are about more that the code on the screen, in the application. They are about culture, trust and collaboration. Smell and readability. So, coding standards, fun topic eh. Arguing over tabs and spaces (check out Silicon Valley if you haven’t already) for alignment of your code. It may seem like a bit of a petty idea to begin with. However, what I believe is that coding standards should give you better tools as a team to be able to collaborate. ...

Read more
Starting Docker: Making Drupal PHPCS Docker Container

Starting Docker: Making Drupal PHPCS Docker Container

Thursday, Dec 29, 2016
Making your own containers can be a super useful way of not only understanding more about docker, but also for understanding more about the systems administration of your applications or docker images. Maybe you want a specific container for running configured services on your machine, or maybe you want to look at packaging your entire system inside a docker container to make it super easy to run. In this quick post, I am going to dover making a Dockerfile and also what to write in it so that you can start making your own containers, today! ...

Read more
Starting Docker: Running NPM, Yarn, Composer and Wraith inside containers

Starting Docker: Running NPM, Yarn, Composer and Wraith inside containers

Wednesday, Dec 14, 2016
As we have already discussed Docker is a great way to isolate your environment and stop items from crashing into each other. Following on from my last post about running tools from inside a container, we looked at running stuff into your container. Now I am going to have some real life examples. I already expect that you know how to mount your files/directories into the container (-v) and how to assign your workdir (-w), so if you don’t have a look at the last post. ...

Read more
Starting Docker: Using tools from inside your containers

Starting Docker: Using tools from inside your containers

Wednesday, Dec 14, 2016
So far we have been discussing using containers, largely from inside the container. However, sometimes you simply want to use tools from inside your docker container rather than having the dependency nightmare of having everything installed locally (or on your server). Attaching/mounting into your Docker container The process of attaching or mounting local files into your container will give you the ability to use those files inside your container. Or store new files created from inside your container to the local file system. ...

Read more
Starting Docker: Working inside a container

Starting Docker: Working inside a container

Friday, Dec 9, 2016
So, you successfully have your containers and you have started to be able to run containers to do stuff. Brilliant. So let us drop into those containers and run something new. You are probably half way there with your understanding, maybe we could say that you have just opened the door on containers, well, you are just about to step in an see how big the room is! Containers give you great, little, isolated machines that you can do with as you please and then throw away. ...

Read more