Latest blog posts by Lee Kelleher
Last November, I heard about the launch of DOCTYPE magazine , a HTML homage to those 80's coding magazines which you'd type-in-by-hand the printed source-code to play some mini game. That's how I learnt to code in BASIC back then. I felt the nostalgia, sounded fun, I promptly ordered a copy. A week or so later, it arrived, I flicked through the magazine, there were 10 standalone webpages, lots of…
With the release of Umbraco's new backoffice (codenamed Bellissima) drawing closer, (May 2024), I wanted to keep a list of work-in-progress (WIP) links to articles and resources for anyone future extension developers. As a first port of call for the most up-to-date list of links and resources, please check out the Umbraco Packages Community Team page Umbraco v14 "Bellissima" Resources , much of…
TL;DR, I joined Umbraco HQ, to work on the Bellissima team. Yes, I'm being paid to work on an open-source project. No, Umbraco did not acquire my Contentment package. Now, the longer story, with plenty of nuance... At the start of 2022, after 10 years, I left my agency, Umbrella. I'd gotten weary with the grind of agency-land, a lack of fulfilment with the quality of work. I wanted to explore a…
Naming things is hard (maybe?) Text casing styles Note: I'll be mentioning different text casing styles in this article. In case you aren't aware of these, here's a quick primer... {% details Lexicon the different text casing styles %} These are the different text casing styles for naming things like folders, files, URLs, variables, etc. Along with the typical UPPERCASE , lowercase , Title Case…
When you learn a programming language, your initial coding style is dictated by the lessons; your teacher; the books you study. My first programming language was Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum 48K. I had a book on how to code simple games, that would influence how I'd name variables, etc. (mostly as single letters, which was a terrible idea). Several years later, I'd got into developing with…
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held To open with a quote by Tim Minchin ... A famous bon mot asserts that opinions are like assholes , in that everyone has one. There is great wisdom in this, but I would add that opinions differ significantly from assholes, in that yours should be constantly and thoroughly examined. Many years ago, I read a post on Jeff Atwood's Coding Horror blog, Strong Opinions,…
Preamble This series is about the migration of my Umbraco package, Contentment, to the new Umbraco backoffice, codenamed Bellissima. If you don't know what any of that means, expand this section for background reading and lexicon for this series. Contentment is the name of my Umbraco package, it contains a bunch of useful property-editors. If you want to see Contentment in action, I did a 30…
Update: 2023-05-23. Due to the lack of interest, the Umbraco Polyfill package has now been deprecated. The source code is available on GitHub: https://github.com/leekelleher/umbraco-polyfill If you are unfamiliar with the term polyfill in web development, here is the definition from MDN... A polyfill is a piece of code (usually JavaScript on the Web) used to provide modern functionality on older…
A couple of weeks ago, Marcin Zajkowski and Adrian Ochmann announced the release of their new Umbraco package, Image Crop Picker . {% twitter 1354821151541710850 %} The Image Crop Picker is a property-editor that enables a specific image crop to be selected from the configuration of a Image Cropper data-type. This can be useful for when a content-editor needs control over which crop is used for…
The first rule of Album Club is... A year or so ago, I was invited to a local "dad's from school" book club. Standard rules, once a month, read the selected book, meet up at a pub, discuss said book for a bit, then continue socialising... or as I commented on it, " a drinking club with a reading problem ". When my second book group meet up came around, I hadn't read the book, I'd actually…