Coding, Environment, Berlin, Brixton, Energy, Random stuff
Back to the exam hall I recently took the B1 German exam and spent around 6 months preparing for it. I originally did my B1 course about 7 years ago when I first moved to Berlin. Back then I didn’t do the exam due to a mix of laziness and pragmatism. I was learning German [ ]
Last year I spent some time experimenting with Elm, a Haskell-like language that compiles to JavaScript. After a bit of a break from web development, I started to look at Elm again. I was curious to see how it compared to ClojureScript the other compile to JavaScript language that I have used. As I have [ ]
I ve been learning Elm recently and writing a few small web app to learn it. The code is on github but its nice to publish the actual page for people to play with. This is pretty easy to do with github pages and elm-make. Just go to your repository, type the following commands and you [ ]
We have started to use Bamboo for building our clojure project. It requires a little bit of tweaking to your project and the bamboo project setup to integrate unit test results fully. First add the test2junit plugin to your leiningein project.clj file: :plugins [[test2junit "1.1.0”]] Then configure Bamboo to run the test2junit task: Finally you need to [ ]
We upgraded an application from Rails 3 to Rails 4 this week and came across an interesting gotcha which I haven’t seen documented anywhere. As we rolled out the Rails 4 version of the app we split the traffic between the upgraded Rails 4 app and our existing Rails 3 app. Some of the requests [ ]
Getting annoyed by timewasters During the Brixton Hill by-election campaign a few years ago I attended a hustings organised by Brixton blog. I got pretty annoyed by how candidates from some parties used the event (and the campaign) to parrot their parties national and international policies. The Socialist Party called for full communism as the [ ]
I got so irritated by Nigel Lawson s appearance on the BBC Radio 4 s Today show this morning that I sent an email to the show. Hello, Your selection of Nigel Lawson in this morning discussion about the link between climate change and the ongoing flooding was awful. You gave Lawson a platform to repeat a [ ]
A friend of friend asked for some advice on how to do SEO for the website of a new (offline) business he was launching. Here are the broad pointers I gave to him: There are 2 types of search engine marketing paid (PPC) and organic (SEO), they are very different but are both ways to [ ]
We have been playing around with Riemann at uSwitch to do some of our monitoring. One of the core metrics we track is the number of customers who are currently converting on our website. If this number drops to zero it usually indicates something is broken. Each time a customer converts an event is sent [ ]
We got some RaspberryPis at uSwitch.com to power our monitoring dashboards. For a bit of fun we also got some peripherals including the new NoIR infrared camera. You need a source of infrared light to see anything so I used a remote control I had lying around. Here is some video of me waving at [ ]