Education Plymouth University - Final Stage Comp. Games Module Review I'm coming to end of my time at Plymouth University and having a variety of modules under my belt, I thought it might be useful to provide a review of them. Having taken
Guest writings A guide to building stable UX experiences for chat bot’s. This is a guest article by Benjamin Paul, chat bot expert and a Senior Engineer at JustEat. Chat bot’s are now becoming more popular however it is very easy to ruin a
Open source mdpdf 1.3 release - headers footers and more This week version 1.3 of mdpdf has been released, I thought I'd take a moment to run through a few of the updates and improvements that have been made since 1.0.
Open source Introducing mdpdf I've been using the atom package markdown-pdf and it's been okay but it hasn't got a few features I want. For starters it uses html-pdf which has header and footer capabilities but setting
Education Officer Some of my latest articles prelude quite obviously to what I'm about to say. I built a chatbot. Yeah... Sorry about that. But this one is slightly different, I promise! The project Announcing
Open source BotBuilder on demand entity recognition So the "global recogniser" from 3.5 isn't really all that "global" it seems. When in the middle of a dialog exchange, it won't actually recognise entities and pass
Software engineering My current workflow stack Happy 2017, lets take a look at the current tooling for this year! One of the joys of starting a new greenfield project, is the chance to choose the technologies and tooling that
Software engineering Bots Chatbots have been around for years, pretty much as long as IRC's actually. But recently a slightly newer breed have been cropping up from the likes of Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft. They've all
Boxes and responsibility Leadership is something I'm very new to. I know very little about what I'm doing when I'm in a position of leadership but I'm learning more and more about it every day. I
User sessions with Rails 5 User sessions allow you to keep track of a particular user of your application and store data against that in some way. The most typical reason is to track an authenticated user that
Wercker and AWS S3 for a static middleman site Recently I've been working on a few projects that are working really well as simple static sites. I've been toying with Middleman and I'm really enjoying it! My current setup for development projects
@USGunIncidents - The twitter feed for gun violence in the USA Yesterday I released a new twitter account. @USGunIncidents posts about recent gun crime in the USA. It posts very simply the town/city, state, number of people injured, number of people killed, and
Education Git friendly teaching I recently read through Alexey Zagalsky's slides from his ICSE16 talk "Student Experiences Using GitHub in Software Engineering Courses". The talk is a presentation of a paper where they explored the
Software engineering Xamarin iOS Continuous Integration Builds So you've just picked up Xamarin and you're wanting to use it at home, or in your company to build some kick ass native iOS apps. Well the first step on the road
Sparkol The last two years I'm leaving Bristol and Sparkol. The last two years have been such an incredibly blessing and journey. I've met many great people, grown personally, and learned so much about my craft. I've been
URLLoader 2032 error - AS3 / AIR 20 We were getting a bunch of 2032 errors from a URLLoader that was trying to access a web server we'd set up. It caused us real headaches because it was working for an
Education A degree isn't a waste, it's a golden opportunity University teaches, well forces, you to teach yourself. If you don't teach yourself at university then you fall into the grades between failing and 2-2. Anything above means you've started to teach yourself,
Xamarin iOS UIImage garbage collection So this week we found out that Xamarin iOS GC doesn't actually know how big a UIImage is, it just knows that it exists (pointers yay). This means that it's often somewhat reluctant
ClassFlow - GitHub for the Classroom As many of you know, I am both a University student, and a strong advocate of git. I think education and version control fit together like two peas in a pod. I've been
Xamarin UI Tests often fail to run after a successful run So I've been messing with the Xamarin UI tests and found that they can sometimes fail for the simple reason the simulator likes to be reset each time. For some reason it'll fail
Blessed to Bless This is a response to todays WiRE, the Christian devotional for busy men. Todays topic is Blessed to Bless I've been blessed in so many ways, many of which I don't even realise
Everyone should use git, and here's why Git (/ɡɪt/) is a distributed revision control system with an emphasis on speed, data integrity, and support for distributed, non-linear workflows. Got it? No? Okay. What is git? Have you got some
Monthly Review: August 2015 So this is a new thing I'm trying out, a monthly public review where I talk about the month gone by on a personal level. I stole this idea from Belle Beth Cooper
Mirror mirror on the wall... We're getting towards the end of the year which typically means people are reflecting on the year gone by and looking forward to the year ahead. I've had a lot of change come
git The atom bomb of git repositories The videoscribe repository was getting out of hand and before I can actually create any new branches I’ve been trying to remove a bunch of files to bring the repository back under