Recent content on Futurepixels
I covered my thoughts around LLM usage in Part I. That was the upside of the content. This part is the downside of it - ethically. I’m very much on the fence with using an LLM. I use it daily at work, and sometimes on my personal projects. Not so much for the code, but the planning, and I find it great to learn new languages. Last year I paid for the lowest subscription to Claude Code to…
Starting out with “AI” Since early 2025, I have been curious on the impact of “AI” in my job and started introducing a Large Language Model [LLM] into my workflow. It started out with using Github’s CoPilot. I found this useful, purely for it’s auto-complete. It had moments of frustration, but all-in-all it was an aid I could do with to speed up my changes. As I…
I’ve been using Gitlab for a good few years now, and I can honestly say they’ve nailed it. Not only is it Open Source & paid for, but they’ve managed to encapsulate the tooling, workflow and processes all under one roof. Over the last year I’ve been trying to get the holy grail of automation dev ops git-ops: ensuring manual intervention for releases in as little - or…
Let me set the scene. You are knee deep in focus with an interesting problem to solve, debugging something that’s been bugging you for ages or just in the flow of crafting your code in your project. Now come’s along that notification in Slack, Discord, email, what ever else is there to grab you out of your flow telling your that “PRODUCTION IS DOWN” (or that pesky project…
Let me set the scene… At the time of writing this, I’d have been writing code for a little over two decades. Professionally, I have been doing it for fourteen years, and the past two years I have been working purely in the wonderful land of JavaScript as both a senior software engineer and then a lead engineer. Why is this important? Well, two weeks ago I was doing a routine update on…
Having been in software engineering for around 15 years, there’s been a lot of talk around Friday deployments - in that you should be able to do them without worries. This is all well and good, but there are some things that you need, and steps you need to make in order to get to the “holy grail” of software delivery in my eyes. In a recent discussion with someone in our team, it…
Growing up, I found focusing a real struggle. With distractions everywhere as a kid, it taught me bad habits. As I grew up, I found my mind wandering with mental distractions like thinking about things non important to me at that time, like what I was doing that evening or wondering something obscure… Over the past few years however, I’ve been trying to really change that with many…
Working with linux over the past few years has been fun but it certainly comes with it’s frustrations. One of them for me is having to mount the drive when I need it, but this is because its not been that important to me to learn. So, tonight I decided to do a bit of reading up about it and learn then put that learning in to place. For myself, I have two drives I would like to mount on boot…
Over the weekend I updated my favourite rolling release of my Linux distro, Solus-Project. I looked through the updates, like I always do and seen there were some updates - one including the Linux kernel! Later that day I shut the PC down and went about the rest of my day. Yesterday I needed to get back on my PC to do something and it wasn’t booting - God damn it!
This is part two of a series. Go read part one if you haven’t already… Over the next few months we would finish a project which was one of the best projects I was involved in. This was lead by my predecessor. I’ve very much been mentored my Leigh the past four years and he has taught me a lot around aspects of my role as an engineer. During this project I pushed for various…
Prelude The past year has been a roller-coaster - for me at least… Back in September 2019, I was promoted to “Lead Software Engineer”. This was a role I was very much excited about, for many reasons - but one reason stood out the most. This was that I was able to help make a difference to my team, the business and more importantly the customer. Anyone who knows me - and knows me…
What is Rancher? Rancher comes in two parts (the first being optional). You have the Rancher Distro and the Rancher Orchestration Tool (I am currently using 1.6, which is where the docs point too). The first part is the Rancher Distro. This is pretty awesome. I know, “another distro” I can hear you say - but this is pretty clever: it is a distro for Docker. It is built entirely on…
My pipeline This is a continued post from Creating a CI & CD pipeline with GitLab, Rancher and Digital Ocean. So, I am using the following tools: GitLab Docker GitLab is an alternative to GitHub. I’ve been trying it out for about 6 to 8 months and finding it very well thought out and fully featured. The main bonus is that you can host it yourself so your code can be truly private and…
Setting the scene Over the past 2 years I’ve been working at First Utility and in that time I have worked with an awesome team - which, in turn has allowed me to pick up a lot of useful methods and learn some pretty amazing stuff. One thing I got into was running my own servers for things like OwnCloud, GitLab and other useful tools. I have a HP MicroServer which allowed me to practice on…
I am using: HP MicroServer Gen 8 Ubuntu Server A laptop with Linux installed as my local machine (This means that I can only provide Linux commands and software that I will be using) My HP MicroServer 8GB Ram Intel Celeron Processor (2 core) 1x 320 HDD 2x 1TB HDD Precursor: I have set up my server a while ago and am not sure what I did during the config.
There is no simpler way to say this, but thank you. Thank you to all involved in all three PHP South Coast conferences. You have all played a big part in who I am today as a software engineer. The speakers were fantastic and the organisers have been great! On a personal level, I want to say thank you as PHP South Coast was my first conference back in 2015 after first getting involved with my local…
tl;dr People are shit at being people. What? Since I started becoming a developer, I have struggled in such a way that I thought I was alone in working with people who are unprofessional by being a bully or just damn right pig headed. I’ve wrote a few articles on this, Coming of age as a PHP developer and then Being a professional developer. I have also presented a talk to two local user…
The problem There is nothing more time consuming than typing: → ssh <user>@<ip-address/hostname> <user>@<ip-address/hostname>'s password: - or - → ssh -i /some/path/to/my/ssh/key <user>@<ip-address/hostname> Seriously, do this multiple times a day, with the added annoyance of entering long server hostname’s like btables@lower.low.some-env.dept-name.my-company.co.uk along with passwords…
I am working from Linux, please submit a pull request to add instructions for Windows/Mac First thing is first, download the iso you want to use as a live disk. To install to a usb stick, you run sudo dd if=/location/of/the.iso of=/dev/X, where x is the USB stick. To find the device you want to install, before inserting the stick run [sudo] fdisk -l. You should be given the following:
Editing the latest commit: Important The following tip is about changing previous commits. If these commits are pushed to the remote, I would strongly advise to not mess with your history as it could break stuff Pretty easy to do so as stated on the git scm book#Changing the last commit. But a quick overview shows the simplicity: $ git commit --amend "Your new message" Editing a commit earlier in…
Thank you This is simply a thank you to people, who have got me to where I am today, and are part of the PHP, HTML, CSS and other communities. It is basically a list that would take a fair few tweets to do, so I wanted it in one place. So, thank you to all the people at PHP Warwickshire and PHP East Midlands as they were the people who have encouraged me to do talks and helped with my initial…
Preface I have now been a Mac OS user for around 8 years now. Don’t get me wrong, I have enjoyed using it. However, I have recently wanted to change for two reasons. The first; I want to advance on my skills as a developer/devops, so I feel like using a pure Linux operating system will help with that in regards to being familiar with the OS, structure, kernel and so on…
This is something I touched on briefly in my last post, ‘Coming of age as a php developer’, but it is something I would like to extend on. What do people expect from a developer? Every one has a different view of what to expect from a developer. Me, personally, I expect to be able to approach another developer and gain knowledge from them as well as be able to ask questions or suggest…
Back in 2009, I was fortunate to find an advert in the paper for a junior PHP developer. I had been using PHP for around a year at this point. I had not been to University or collage to learn any programming, it was all self taught. I applied and was a successful candidate and worked there for just over a year and a half. Me, a junior? Cool! I had only really been a hobby developer in my spare…
Self management Why I have written this post Since moving from a hobby developer with the most basic of HTML knowledge since school, I have set targets on improvement of my knowledge within programming. Although my knowledge has improved to a certain degree, along with my workflow, my self management however has got no better. Sure, you can have all the tools you need and within the 4 years (at…
Setting up Git Installing Git There are few ways to install Git on a mac (I will eventually add guides on Windows and Linux). Install Xcode (and install the command line tools for an added bonus) Simply install via the App Store App. Install via brew Providing you have brew installed (installation instructions on the site), then; once installed run [sudo] brew install git Download direct from…
So, this is just a quick hello and to say thank’s for visiting. I am currently in between writting some other articles and tutorials at the moment along with at the end of buying a house, so this may take some time as I also need to decorate the house… all good fun. So, a thank you for visiting the site and I hope you come here every now and then, and if you would like to drop me a…
// Professional Summary A software engineer of 15+ years of experience building scalable web applications and API's, as well as leading cross-functional teams. Strong experience in PHP, React and Typescript and DevOps practice, as well as gaining stronger knowledge with Go and little experience with Rust, with a proven track record of improving developer experience and delivering business value…
This is just a list of book that I am wanting to read, am reading and have read. The Clean Coder: A Code of Conduct for Professional Programmers Author: Robert C Martin Vagrant Cookbook Author: Erika Heidi Culture Of Respect Author: Cal Evans Build APIs You Won't Hate Author: Phil Sturgeon Pro Vim Author: Mark McDonnell The Pheonix Poject Author: Gene Kim The Unicorn Poject Author: Gene Kim Good…
Skills set's I've managed to add to my tool belt for front end are the usual; HTML4/5 *, CSS2/3 *, SASS, Javascript *, ReactJS *, Accessibility *. For languages and scripting I am proficient in PHP *, Ruby, Python *, GoLang, Javascript *, NodeJS, Rust, Nix Shell (Bash, ZSH) *, Lua, Typescript *. I am a big believer in the DevOps mentality and have learnt the following tools: Ansible, GitLab CI,…
Hi there, I’m Nigel, an Engineering Manager , a father and fan of geeky stuff… A software engineer of 17 years, I have started with very little knowledge and since then have being lucky to grow my knowledge to a variety of coding languages and practice’s. I have a keen interest in Domain Driven Design, Test Driven Development, Behaviour Driven Development and having a mentor and…