me Glasses I hate buying shoes. They're a fashion statement. They lock you into a 'look'. I don't feel like I have a look but when you buy a pair of shoes you need to make a decision about what sort of 'look' you have. I'm nearly 37. It turns out I
Shaving So shaving. I hate shaving. I'm a bearded man and that is directly related to just how boring I find shaving. But I work in advertising now. So it's time I started to take at least a little bit of care in my appearance so I've started shaving again (once
cycling An update So my compadre (and former podcast co-host) Terry is currently doing a bit of travel around SE Asia and blogging fairly regularly. It has reminded me that I have an unloved blog and how I'd like to write more. The problem is I either feel like I don't have anything
OS X Power Users I recently saw an argument break out on a Python Slack channel I lurk on about the importance of 'power users' and how much attention tech companies should pay to them. It degenerated into an argument about whether or not OSX rebuilt their entire OS on BSD because of the
Islam Islam in Australia I just read the wonderful Celeste Liddle's latest post [http://blackfeministranter.blogspot.com.au/2016/06/the-neutralising-of-hate.html] in which she makes the following point in passing: > "even though the Muslim connection to this land mass predates white invasion by up to an estimated 200 years" Not that I doubted
Wordpress My Kingdom for a CMS I have a new job. Yay. Seriously, I'm very happy about it. I get a lot of control over the technical direction the company goes which is all a developer can ever ask for. But the first job I've had to do for them was in Drupal. I don't want
Design Patterns On Learning Design Patterns In my last post [http://goonan.io/becoming-a-senior-dev/] I lamented a missed opportunity where I feel I would have learnt a lot - particularly in terms of Design Patterns. To someone like me, a fairly experienced but self taught developer, it's easy to feel like Design Patterns are the 'Holy
NodeJS Knock backs and Becoming a Senior Developer I recently got knocked back for a job that pretty much looked like my dream job. It was a startup with a team of four - two senior devs, a junior and a lead/architect. My interview was with the lead/architect, there was a simple code test that I
Python Setting up PostgreSQL and Django on OS X I've been keen to start using PostgreSQL for far too long now. Everyone raves about it and MySQL has lost it's open source cred since being acquired by Oracle. But I was quickly starting to believe that the reason people were raving about it (particularly Python and Ruby folk) was
Django Podcast Feeds in Django I've been talking to Terry Johal [http://terryjohal.com/] about getting our podcast [http://stillangry.com] up and running again. Naturally my action plan was to rebuild the website. It was original built in CakePHP but has a few little bugs I've never got around to fixing so I thought
Flask Testing File uploads in Flask I was recently writing Flask integration tests for a form that had a file upload parameter. As it turns out, is isn't as straight forward as I had thought it would be. A basic file upload test might look like this: def test_logo(self): data = dict(logo=(io.BytesIO(
My Work Church Street Funding Once again I teamed up with Voist [http://www.voist.co.uk/] and and the City of Westminster [https://www.westminster.gov.uk/] to develop a website for their Arts and Culture Funding Program. The site allows users to register, manage incomplete applications, upload required documents and submit proposals. Admin
Python Flask-WTF tricks I use Flask-WTF [https://flask-wtf.readthedocs.org/en/latest/]'s What the Form [http://wtforms.readthedocs.org] module for most of my Flask projects as it takes care of things like csrf tokens and so on which is a nice piece of mind. I have recently come across a couple
PHP I heart Laravel Recently all the code I've been writing has been in Python which is definitely my preference at the moment. But I got some freelance work which required me to build a site using PHP so I went shopping for a framework and ended up with Laravel [https://laravel.com/]. I
Apple In defence of Apple I feel compelled to add to the growing number of voices out there defending Apple right now. Especially when rubbish [http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/19/privacy-apple-vatican-fbi-iphone-san-bernardino-confessional] like this is being printed which clearly shows no understanding of privacy or Cryptography for that matter. Firstly, let's not forget
Flask Application Factories I was running some tests on a Flask application recently and ran into some weird errors [stackoverflow.com/questions/35276265/flask-script-loads-app-before-running-unittests/35279836] . I was using Flask-WTF [http://flask-wtf.readthedocs.org/en/latest/] to create a form with a select box that was populated from the database. I was using Flask-Script
My Work AFL Tipster I'm a massive fan of Australian Rules Football and every year I end up in a tipping competition of one sort or another. And every year I get really frustrated at the poor design of sites that are more concerned with advertising revenue from gambling companies than a half decent
Errors Error Logging Putting an app live can be nerve racking. Who knows what will go wrong once it's released into the wild. So if something breaks you want to know about it with as much detail as possible. In debug mode, Flask provides some really helpful debugging information with a full stack
Python Google Login In the next few days we'll be rolling out Google OAuth authentication so users can login with their Google accounts rather than having to remember yet another password (although everyone should just be using 1Password [https://agilebits.com/onepassword]). I started off using Flask OAuth [https://pythonhosted.org/Flask-OAuth/] but
LetsEncrypt Setting up a new site with LetsEncrypt and Nginx I've been absolutely buzzing about LetsEncrypt [https://letsencrypt.org/] since it was first announced. It was a long overdue addition to life on the web. In this post-Snowden era, encryption has never been more important. So went I set up this blog (and am soon to set up the main
My Work Mapify Church Street Mapify [http://wearemapify.com/] were looking to showcase some of their work to the community surrounding Church St in Westminster, London. So they asked Chloe Frank [http://chloefrank.co.uk/] and me to help put a prototype of some of their work together. The site maps the various stakeholders in
My Work Sussy Cazalet As Sussy's Interior Consultancy & Art direction business continued to grow she need a new, mobile responsive website to show off her stunning work. She contacted A New Mark [http://www.anewmark.com/] who designed the site to showcase her work. A New Mark contacted me to build the site. We
Data Dealing with xls files in Python It's been a long day coding. I've nearly finished all the preliminary scrapers for each state parliament and I must say I'll be glad to move onto the next phase. I thought it's probably worth outlining my biggest coding struggle today just in case anyone else ever has the same
Python Upgrading from Python 2 to Python 3 I've always liked to think of myself as an early adopter. However to date, I've been using Python 2 and it's been bugging me. We're up to Python 3.5 already. I think the biggest barrier for me has always been that OS X's default is still 2.7 but
Python Database Listeners I'm starting to work on a system of checks to ensure the database is up to date. The way I see it, the checks will run on a fairly regular cron and generate 'issues' where Data doesn't line up. Users will also have a way of generating 'issues' so there's
