Sitting at the intersection of Christianity and technology…
I’m switching up from the auto-generated now page; to some hybrid approach. The generated one is fine , but felt a bit… automated. Key things that are happening now, as of May 2026… I’m 18 months into working at Beacon CRM . We’re currently working on a big migration from Postgres to Google Spanner . It’s full on, there’s much learn there. I’m still working out what to do and what I think about…
Advantages (as I see them). Quick start These are handy things… Gotchas Advantages (as I see them). It stores node_modules in a single place and references them, rather than having multiple copies of the same dependency across different files - this makes pnpm install and a lot quicker and reduces disk space. You can prune dev dependencies ahead of deployment in CI, meaning you can run the test…
At work I’m in and out of many repos over the course of a day… and I’m bad at closing window. The result is that I often end up with at least five different Visual Studio Code or Cursor windows at one time. Finding the window that I want to write code in can be tricky when they all look the same. As such I’ve recently started adding theme colours to each repo that I work on so I can quickly…
On Sunday my wife and I had the joy, together with The Globe Church family, of dedicating our son. Since people come to our church from all sorts of different backgrounds and Christian traditions, I thought it would be helpful to share what child dedication means to us as a church and why we approach it this way. You may have seen, or been part of churches that practice, infant baptism. We love…
This morning MacRumors posted a PSA that Bartender was under new ownership . The company behind Bartender, a very handy utility app allowing users to hide icons in the MacOS menu bar, had silently been sold. The price had been hiked, and it is not clear if the new owners plan to announce themselves… The article ends “The new owner’s intentions are not clear, but as Reddit users have pointed out,…
I’ve recently needed to get my head around Sharepoint… as someone who has spent most of their time in Google Workspace this is a whole new world to me! What’s interesting about jumping into the Microsoft 365 is you’re never a few clicks away from uncovering a UI that looks like it was built in 2010. Today’s challenge was trying to change the URL of a Sharepoint site that had started life as ‘Test…
Earlier this week, Twilio publically announced that Authy would be ending their Windows, Linux, and MacOS apps . Starting March 19, 2024, Twilio Desktop Authy apps will reach their end of life (EOL). Beyond this date, you can access most of the desktop features and functionality in the mobile Authy apps. It is lovely that I can access ‘most’ of the functionality on via the mobile apps… but what if…
Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar have functionality that allow you to subscribe to calendar feeds; add the URL of the feed, and then it will appear (and update) automatically in your calendar. There is a standardised format called ical [1] , and it contains as you would expect – events on a calendar. This is useful to subscribing to public holiday calendar feeds, key dates within shared…
Over the last year I’ve been giving the Discipleship Tech team a little bit of help on the project management side of things. I’ve known Andy for many years now as we’ve worked together on Kingdom Code , and a couple of years ago we worked together on the Redeeming Time app [1] . Each year Andy puts out an ‘in review’ blog post, and it’s been so encouraging to see the result of the work that he…
I had an idea yesterday to pull the last commit detail from the git repo for this site and put it as an HTML comment so I can identify deploy issues quickly. A little bit of googling later I had a couple of extra lines hidden away in the generated HTML. (Go on, right click, view source, and scroll to the bottom)… <!-- generator: Eleventy v3.0.0 last build: production – Tue Dec 18 2023 15:55:02…
May 2026 Update: Age of Empires 2 is now runs on MacOS ; just download it from Steam. You can safely ignore the rest of this post. My setup for running Age of Empires 2 is on M1 MacBook Pro running MacOS Sonoma (14.2), the following steps worked for me. Your milage may vary. Step One: Buy Age of Empires If you don’t own Age of Empires II Definitive Edition , buying it is a good place to start.…
The Christmas holidays have begun, which means that I have a bit of time to tinker… I can’t remember when I stopped using Google Analytics, but it was probably when I moved across to using Eleventy . However I recently came across Tinylytics and figured I’d give it a try. There are a number of GA alternatives out there such as Fathom or Plausible which by all accounts are good, however I’ve always…
There’s been a trend floating around the blogosphere this month looking at the default apps people are using… I like that. This is my list: 📨 Mail Client I’ve got far too many email addresses… and I’m checking each of them via webmail on the desktop. Mostly Google Workspace / Gmail. I don’t like this solution. I really should get back into a proper mail client in 2024! 📮 Mail Server For my…
In some research and development time I’ve been exploring some of the technology behind ChatGPT, and pulling on different contexts for uses of it. One of the more interesting areas where I’ve seen this applied is using a conversational interface. An interface where a user can search a knowledge base, blog posts, set of articles, etc and return not just a set of links (eg as a traditional search…
At the moment view transitions are still being implemented, but it doesn’t mean that you can’t get ahead of the curve and experiment with them. However they’re not enabled by default; so in Chrome Canary you’ll need to toggle the following settings first: chrome://flags#view-transition chrome://flags#view-transition-on-navigation Cross fade The default behaviour for view transitions is a simple…
If you have a Conversational Action Continue the conversation Now is the time to let your customer base know what is happening. Google has included a message when users invoke the action, but you can proactively communicate to your customers so they know they can continue the conversation via your other channels. If you have an Alexa Skill, a chatbot on your website, or more traditional customer…
On a recent Eleventy project I needed a calendar of upcoming events . One of the challenges that a static site generator brings is that when the site is built, it is fixed… some may even go as far to say it is static. The implication of this, is that there’s no dynamic pulling from a database when a user loads the page. So, if you have a section saying ‘events happening today’ that will very…
I’m keeping my account open… I’ll even log in every now and again to keep the account appearing active because I don’t want my username to vanish. But I think that my activity on Twitter is now at and end. Many words (more eloquent that what I’ll write) have been written talking about what’s been happening in the Twitterland over the last months, and realistically the last few years. At best it’s…
This weekend I’ve been implementing automatically generated opengraph images for blog posts as a quick experiment for a side project I’ve been planning. There are number of methods to achieve this, Bernard Nijenhuis’ Eleventy only solution is really neat [1] . I’ve followed that implementation ( related commit ) and it’s working really nicely [2] . The issue is that my modifications (and design…
BUILD 2022 was our seventh year coming together for a weekend of work, merging our tech skills with our Christian faith. This year saw the return of many people who have been with us since the beginning, and a number of new faces and ministries coming together for a weekend of cross-church of productivity, focus, community building, and worship. How good and pleasant… One of the joys of an event…
We’ve been building for the Google Assistant platform, creating experiences that users can access from devices such as phones and home hubs. Last month, however, the Google Assistant team announced that they will ‘sunset’ Conversational Actions next year. This decision takes away the routes for brands to have standalone custom experiences on Google Assistant. An announcement on their developer…
Chrome likes to steal your media keys - the play/pause buttons on your keyboard and then map them through to YouTube, or similar media. This is regardless of if Chrome has focus, or if the tab has focus - you can have a paused YouTube window in the background, want to pause your music via Spotify, hit the pause button on your keyboard… and suddenly you have Spotify still playing, and the YouTube…
On a recent project I’ve been experimenting with adding Airtable as a content management system for Eleventy (11ty). Below I document the notes around how I’ve got a simple set up running… Because tech posts tend to date, I’m using the following npm packages… there may be modifications needed for newer (or older) releases! @11ty/eleventy: v0.12.1 @11ty/eleventy-cache-assets: 2.3.0 airtable: 0.11.1…
Bowtie is an app that I’ve been using pretty much since I switched to running a Mac. A simple utility application; it hooks into iTunes, Spotify, etc and displays the currently playing track on the desktop. It’s simple, elegant, customisable, and regrettably abandoned. Despite not receiving an update since 2012(!) it runs perfectly well, but I’ve always tried to keep half an eye out for…
Today I had the challenge of wiping a Slack workspace/team of all the chat history. There isn’t a handy one click button to do this. The slow way around this is to go through each channel one by one, deleting the channel and then recreating it. This works with everything until you get to the #general channel (or whatever it was set up to be). There are a couple of Chrome extensions which promise…
As the whole ‘working-from-home’ thing became a thing the built in camera on my laptop decided that it was a good time to die. And because everyone else had a need to buy a webcam there was a bit of a shortage, that meant that I ended up with a perfectly functional stop gap. Recently Anker entered the webcam and conferencing gear, were offering a decent discount, so I decided that now was the time…
“I’m already sick of the term hybrid” one of my friends told me over the weekend; “I’m hearing it so much at the moment” . Everything is trying to work out how to become hybrid - for example the restaurants and pubs doing bookings and food orders over your phone, or the choirs who are meeting in smaller groups and then stitching their recordings together. And when it comes to thinking about hybrid…
Ahead of the launch of Stewardship launching their new CauseFinder tool I spoke with Joel Leakey about how Jesus is a technologist. So, you have Kingdom Code, LiveWires, and OneSheep – could you give us a brief summary of those? The heart behind Kingdom Code is to work with Christians who are in the tech world. Helping them see that it’s not that they’re a Christian on Sunday and a technologist in…
Over the last week I’ve been dealing with a number of issues relating to SSL certs; one discovery where the SSL cert expired yesterday, another standard update of a SSL cert, and then the fun of swapping from one server to another with different certs. In each of these cases it’s important to know that the right certificate is in place. You can check these things in the browser - the padlock icon…
In just under 25 pages, Sara Schumacher , Director of Education at St. Mellitus College, packs in more clarity, focus, and personal encouragement than books 10 times the length on the subject of spiritual disciplines. [1] This might be a bold claim, but let me talk you through why I think this book(let) is really important, especially as we learn to adapt to so much of our life happening online.…
It’s been on my list to get a good archive page of blog posts for a while, [1] more than just simple pagination where you have to click though posts in groups of six at a time… Instead grouped by the year they were published. I had a hunch that that 11ty’s pagination tool would help me out, I just hadn’t worked it out until this weekend… Skip the rest of the intro and take me to the code More…
Even before national lockdowns, and our interactions with the world being mediated through screens, we have been interacting with artificial intelligence every day. Be that a social media feed, YouTube or Netflix recommendations, smart home devices, online translation services, etc, it all has AI behind it. Last year Jason Thacker wrote The Age of AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of…
Over at OneSheep we’ve just launched the new website for Carnelian Search . Carnelian is company who works with charities or social impact organisations to help them fill leadership position such as executive, director or trustee roles. Behind the scenes of their new site is a fresh Eleventy build, with Tailwind CSS , and a small sprinkling of AlpineJS , all deployed on top of Netlify . We think…
While there are many good things about owning a MacBook, the keyboards in the 2017 model are not one of them! Low travel, sticky keys, falling off keys… the keyboard is just not the dream. While later models fixed these issues, I’m stuck with the 2017 model… I’ve had my eye the offerings from Keychron for a while, however had been put off by the sizes - either the slightly bulky frames, or the…
Books about leadership have a bad tendency to be dense; dry and hard work to read, and that’s before you get to the unobtainable objectives such as like read a book before you’ve lifted your head from the pillow in the morning. Maybe I’ve been reading the wrong books… but I’ve tended to stay away from this section of the library. So, when your friends, Nick and Ali , write a book called What Comes…
2023 update This tutorial works nicely playing Age of Empires 2: HD Edition on an Intel based Mac… You’ll have no luck with Definitive Edition, or running on Apple Silicon macs using this guide. Have a look at Running AoE 2 on Apple Silicon instead. 👀 As with all technical blog posts as the technology gets updated things will break - this post will probably become out of date very quickly. My…
I’ve recently had the interesting time of setting up a new Google Workspace (formerly GSuite) install. Migrating emails between previous service providers is handled by Google’s Data Migration Service . This work well (if a little slowly), however when setting up to import from a personal Yahoo Mail account several users report getting an error like this: Error communicating with the source mail…
I was recently invited to give a 15 minute talk to a group of church worker about how data can equip and resource a church to be a church that is more productive, more pastoral, and more prayerful. Below are the slides and the transcript for that talk. I find this a hard subject to talk about, because there is a tension to keep. Let’s ground this right from the start Jesus drives his church, it’s…
One of the requirements of a classic brochureware website these days is animated elements that fade into view as the visitor scrolls to the website. There are a number of Javascript libraries to help you do this, like Michał Sajnoóg’s AOS - Animate on Scroll Library … but how do you do this kind of thing with Tailwind CSS and as little JavaScript as you can get away with?! Tailwind 1.6 Tailwind…
I think that Trello is up there in my favourite online tools. It’s a simple project management tool; I’ve used in each job I’ve had since leaving uni, and it has been a staple for me keeping track of other things such as my reading list . Previously I’ve tinkered around with the API, but it has only been recently that I used it for a live project; pulling in the reading list board onto my reading…
Our last message to you was to let you know we were in a time of waiting. Many will know how difficult the last couple of months have been for us, being forced to postpone making promises to one another and starting our married life. However, now two months on, we are so pleased to say we are finally able to get married! The new regulations will come into effect on the Fourth of July, and so…
In the coming weeks and months ahead in this Insights section we’re going to be posting a few tips and tricks that we’ve discovered as we have been building sites for our partners. One of the key things we’ve needed on this site to make that possible is the ability to display code snippets in these blog posts… < h1 > Like this HTML block </ h1 > This syntax highlighting is handled by PrismJS,…
Back in 2018 when I migrated the site from Codeigniter to Eleventy Gulp was very firmly in my toolbox. It’s been a while since I started a new project with Gulp, tending to favour Laravel Mix , however Mix doesn’t feel right for Eleventy. About a month ago Max Böck shared his Eleventy starter kit Eleventastic , it contained a whole host of clever things that I didn’t know you could do… of note,…
The Second of May was due to have been our wedding day. As a result of what’s happening globally, our plans have had to be postponed; church buildings are closed and paperwork isn’t being issued. The implication is that it is not possible to get married in the morning. Even though we desperately want to make these commitments to each other, legally we are restricted. For everyone, this season has…
A month into lockdown and we’re beginning to stablise - there is more of an understanding of how our lives work now. We don’t need to worry about panic buying toilet paper, our churches are beginning to get their heads around that live-streaming thing, and this is good! As I’ve been catching up with people it has become apparent that there are two tribes of people at the moment – those with more…
Over the last two weeks at The Globe Church we’ve been in the Psalms of Ascent, the songs that the Isralites sing as they ascent to the temple of the Lord in Jerusalem. The songs teach us and point us to see God more clearly - they are climbing the hill to go to a holy place - a place set aside for God to dwell. These songs show us how holy God, and his dwelling place, is. In contrast these songs…
As we face further into lockdown of the UK, our churches have embraced livestreaming as a way of keeping in touch with our church families. I’m not going to write a how-to guide, there are plenty of those on the internet , instead this is a note of the lessons that we learnt this week at The Globe Church . ✅ Plan it! You wouldn’t go into a service unplanned. Make sure you have a clear service plan…
As the government encourages us to reduce the amount of social interaction, now is the perfect time for the Kingdom Code community to serve the local church. We’re a community of technologists, people who build and implement tools to solve real world problems, and this week our churches have some big problems. How do we hold in tension the Christian priority of meeting together to worship with the…
In light of Covid-19 and lots of churches moving their services online I had a chat with CCLI and PRS for music around the legalities of live streaming the sung worship in your church. What follows is my understanding of the situation… please note that I am not a copyright lawyer . Too long… didn’t read: Music in the public domain is fair game. Do what you want with it. Your church worship leader…
Every so often I find myself with a JPG logo that I really want an SVG for… It’s a pain because the JPG just won’t scale for web or print work. There are a number of tracers out there, however until recently I’ve always found that they create more problems than they solve. A recent project put me back looking for one of those tools, and figuring that it is 2020, things must have improved by now… I…