One Self-Portrait a day

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Anthony

At 6am on January the first, I sketched a self-portrait:

…it's too early for this!

…and thought that might be a fun, creative, enlightening, educative and perhaps exasperating thing to do every day.

Every day of 2012 I’ll execute a self-portrait, and share it using Twitter the same day. Sharing them provides an impetus to complete each day’s portrait, and gives me the determination to work on my methods and my approach.

An audience (even a theoretical one) gives me a reason to improve. The risk is that you end up sharing 365 crap images of yourself with the world, the pay-off is that every day you add to your experience, your conceptual and technical capabilities, and your satisfaction with your work.

Week one’s self-portraits

The output so far has been representational, brief and sketchy, possibly no surprise at the outset. Representationally, they’re not up to much. I am capable of better, but this is a journey.

: January 1st

: January 2nd

: January 3rd

: January 4th

: January 4th

: January 5th

: January 6th

: January 7th

: January 8th

Time

The greatest constraint so far has been time. Time to conceive an approach to a portrait as well as time to execute it. Thus the first week’s output has been low concept, and quickly executed. I’ve tried to vary media a little during the week but each has been a very direct method.

Not having the time to work on drawing and painting is the best reason I can think of to continue this project, regardless of the work produced.

Concept

Telling yourself you have to do this, every day, is at once a burden and a joy. Until you place constraints on what you do, you don’t realise the clarity of thought you can attain within those limits.

I have many plans for where this project will take me, my thought processes and my experience with various media. My immediate aims are to work in paint and some form of printing as soon as I can, but working with traditional media will just be one part of the project.

Every week or so, I’ll add a post here on recent works and where I think they’re heading, and more importantly where they’re taking me.

Inaugural Preston CodeJo, November 28th 2011

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Anthony

Facilitated by @ruby_gem and hosted by @phpcodemonkey, the first Preston CodeJo was held last night at Magma Digital’s offices on Winckley Square. Using themed ‘katas’, this is the first of an open-ended series of events designed to challenge and extend developer abilities and interaction across programming/development disciplines.

This month’s kata asked attendees to use a Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach to solving a simple problem using the Ruby language.

Continue reading →

Final thoughts on PHP North West 2011

Posted on October 11, 2011 by Anthony

Sunday’s track choices

My second day at the PHP North West Conference 2011 kicked off with Paul Lemon’s ‘Feeling Secure?’ talk.

Paul used succinct code samples and made a point of covering the basic attack methods, assuming no great depth of knowledge for some and the need to re-iterate its importance to the rest of us. For each attack type, variant methods were demonstrated that perhaps would have been unfamiliar to some – this was certainly borne out during the Q&A session. Paul had far more topics to cover and hopefully there’ll be an extended security presentation at a future conference.

Following this I attended Walter Ebert‘s talk on URL design. Walter had gone to some trouble to locate examples of good practice in human-readable, RESTful web addressing as well as some neat workarounds for common problems – for example url handling routines for those long descriptive links that email clients break when they wrap text.

Finally I listened to Richard Backhouse talk about compiling PHP to .NET using open source tool Phalanger. Richard covered the background to his company’s adoption of the approach, client considerations, use cases and opportunities for mixing languages & libraries for a best-of-both approach.

Take Away

I tend to take away both strong themes and important (though sometimes small) messages from conferences that stick with me, influencing the design decisions and production routes on current and future projects. They’re not always from a favourite or most enjoyable presentation, but they highlight the event’s greater whole.

Laura Beth Denker‘s Saturday track 1 talk emphasised the need to retain practicality and perspective in software production (in particular, testing). Yes we have the tools, but are we using them effectively, are we curtailing our own faculties in favour automated methods, do we put enough trust in our collaborators?

The major frameworks has a strong showing, but Alistair Stead and Paul Lemon provided timely reminders of those areas that still require careful thought and action – response times, the right caching techniques regardless of chosen technology, the importance of validation and knoweldge of protocols and security basics.

Finally, Ian Barber‘s keynote brings all this together – the tools exist to allow you to contribute to great developments and create new ones. Use the right tools for right purpose and keep a keen eye on what’s around you – in programming, and in the wider world.

PHPNW11 was all about (as @Elblinkin put it) ‘Keyboard, mouse and You’.

Saturday at PHP North West 2011

Posted on October 9, 2011 by Anthony

The PHP North West conference gets bigger and better every year, and 2011 sees the Saturday and Sunday conference enlived by a Friday tutorial day and an unconference running alongside the scheduled tracks.

Saturday morning kicked off with keynote speaker Ian Barber‘s revealing tour of the small steps that made great software even better, and the ways that diverse personal interests, hobbies and a willingness to ignore conventional wisdom led to innovations that we in turn can build upon and contribute to.
Having a broad range of work and hobby interests, I could only agree with Ian on his belief in cross-fertilisation of ideas and approaches, and it was good to be reminded that being interested and aware is often more effective than aiming high.

Starting off Track 1, Enrico Zimuel introduced the new features and architecture of Zend Framework 2 followed by Sebastian Bergmann‘s talk on PHP Testing tools. Sebastian compared the various approaches and features of the most ubiquitous and newly released tools including his own project PHPUnit , the Atoum framework and the behaviour / scenario driven BeHat.

In the afternoon I attended Alistair Stead‘s track 2 talk about the Varnish reverse proxy cache. In addition to presenting Varnish’s impressive capabilities, Alistair examined the pitfalls of adding multiple cache layers, configuration gotchas, as well as privacy and security concerns in good depth.

Track 2 continued with Stefan Koopmanschap‘s introduction to the recently released Symfony2 framework. For those of us with experience of prior releases, Symfony2 appears to differ significantly and will take some getting used to. The Bundles approach follows the components theme running through the conference this year.

The final talk in track 1 was Laura Beth Denker‘s ‘Are your tests really helping?’. After informing the crowd that her company pushed code every 20 minutes or so, you would have expected a breakdown of intensive automated test routines, but what was presented was a practical approach involving well organised unit testing; having faith in fellow developers and trust in the external services (and if you don’t have faith or trust, you should probably replace both) in order to reduce the need for extensive integration and functional testing.

PHPNW11 continues today, Sunday 9th October. Feedback for talks can be read and provided on JoindIn.

Rustbucket and I

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Anthony

Rustbucket (My 1980′s Raleigh Equipe and it’s patina) and I will be riding in the Manchester to Blackpool charity cycle event this coming Sunday, 10th July.

If you’d like to sponsor me for the sixty-miler then click the JustGiving link, all funds raised go the Christie Charitable Fund.

Despite the name, Rustbucket‘s already proved capable of holding up under pressure and distance.

Let’s hope the months of training mean my riding buddies and I can do the same.

My Ideas Of March

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Anthony

A post in support of Chris Shiflett‘s call for a blogging revival.

I follow around sixty bloggers and blog sites on topics that include the arts (artists blogs such as Martin Greenland‘s blog); alot of web, mobile, application design and programming commentary; Institutional IT views from Brian Kelly, Mike Ellis as well as long form writing about online marketing, data visualisation , typography and graphic design.
There are history and archaeology blogs too. Paul Barford’s Portable Anquity Collecting and Heritage Issues and the Heritage Journal.

Why blogs matter to me

I’ve seen and met many interesting people that share my interests, work in my field, or both. Their weblogs provide me with an astonishing wealth of written, visual and auditory entertainment, information and commentary on the things that matter to me.

Such wealth, archived online. Ready to entertain, inform and inspire the next visitor.

Its Alexandria on speed.

Re-birth of the Author

I came to blogging proper in late 2006, I’d begun study for a computing MSc and had begun to dip my toes into Open Source development. I installed WordPress and have stayed with it for the sense of control and ownership of content.

I write about my interests – visual design, photography, painting, history, heritage issues, archaeology and on occasion personal things – usually the joys.

I also write about the events I’ve attended and the technologies I am using, evaluating, or developing in my role as a Higher Education web developer or for other projects. I enjoy sharing the things I find out and on occasion they assist others too.

Ideas of March

This month I’ll be writing about the personal goals and challenges I have ahead of me. I’ll be rounding up the threads about the recently launched Guerilla Gardening the Institutional Web Course Finder UX project I kicked off many moons ago, and perhaps write some more on the PHP frameworks I use.

Jackie Oates at Trelawnyd Memorial Hall

Posted on March 14, 2011 by Anthony

Jackie Oates and band live at Trelawnyd Memorial Hall, March 12th 2011

Gigs at Trelawnyd are always something special. The hall is beatiful, big yet intimate at the same time. The atmosphere’s relaxed and the sound always spot on, possibly the best gig sound I’ve heard.

Last year we saw Jim Moray, and last Saturday we had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Jackie Oates and band play at the Memorial Hall, suppported by the very talented folky-funky The Bear Beats Band.

Course Finder, an eventual reality

Posted on February 24, 2011 by Anthony

A long time ago…

Back in 2009, I examined the way in which courses could be listed and searched for at my University and developed a prototype user-interface to increase the visibility of each course we offer.

Things began as a personal project carried out in spare time – an ‘unofficial, unbidden and unapproved endeavour’ I described it back then – with the aim of creating something demonstrably useful that could be further developed.

Revisiting the basics

The design and prototyping was extensively blogged at the time, and the first prototype demo’d (to a packed tent ) at BathCamp BarCamp 2009. You can read more about the UX design in the following posts tagged guerrilla-gardening. In 2011, development of the interface has finally begun in earnest.

Available Data

The greatest limitation at inception was available data. Course information was coming from a content-managed JSON source and provided only course title and web-page URL. It must also be understood that while there is knowledge of formal course data formats, we have none in use that combine course and marketing information. Thankfully, a separate project to manage course web-page delivery through Microsoft Sharepoint has allowed full database access to extensive course information.

New design and UX considerations

Here’s how things looked in 2009:

Scrolling the Course Listings by starting letter

The first change is that we’ll be concentrating on undergraduate courses, so no tab structure.

Secondly, we had a rather ugly switch from course title lists to a title + summary listing from the Ultraseek search API, but the more reliable data source has changed that.
The latest incarnation treats course listings as definitive course records, so when an as-you-type filter phrase is searched for withÂ a click of the search button, the results aren’t re-presented but they’re used to augment the existing course listing with a summary of text from the live page.

Thirdly, stakeholders in the project agreed that being able to update the list the moment you type a letter means we can do away with the row of alphetic teeth that previously mirrored the Content Managed A-Z list pages (they’re days are numbered too).

One new feature on-the-cards is sorting/grouping by faculty, again afforded to us by better data. This should allow for a lightweight, low overhead means of seeing related courses, grouped by faculty and highlighted by the corporate faculty colour.

As-you-type filtering narrows the list as before, but also updates a match count and six other course counters for each displayed faculty.

Type ‘engineer’ for example and you see the bulk of courses under the Faculty of Technology, where you may find other courses related to your area of interest. Type ‘forensics’, and you see courses across Business, Technology and Science, inviting you to examine their differences.

Under the hood

The bulk of the code is still classic ASP (I know, I know). jQuery has replaced Scriptaculous/Prototype for the client-side interaction, a design choice primarily, but also a matter of support knowledge.

Basic course listings are served in an unordered list for static-page accessibility, and they’re then enhanced with JSON-based detailed course information. We’ll be popping the scrolling list to full height for compatibility with mobile devices in the short term.

Of course, the JSON formatting of detailed course information by faculty is an opportunity in itself.

We’ll be using Google Analytics, our tracker of choice for some time now to see if this makes a difference, which given the tens of page loads we’re saving ought be significant. Track Events will also be used to assess every client-side interaction with the Course Finder to inform its future development.

New advantages

It is hoped that as-and-when it goes live, faculties should be able to link directly to their own listings in the main marketing courses area, so eliminating the need for duplicated content in the CMS. An upgrade to IISÂ affords the opportunity finally get course titles in the URLs using something akin to Apache mod_rewrite.

Deployment is imminent.

Preston Tweetup 12th October 2010

Posted on October 14, 2010 by Anthony

I popped along to the third Preston Tweetup this week, at the New Continental down by the river.

As this was my first Tweetup I only had the invitation guidance to prepare me; this gave use the discussion topic and more importantly the promise of a first drink, courtesy of sponsors Stage9.

The topic, ‘How can online communities strengthen offline communities?’ was a little tough to get into. The benefits of a community operating in any medium would naturally be shared, and the common social media tools are well established. I was fortunate to find myself on a table with a diverse range of people: A marketing director, another web developer, a General Manager from a local hotel chain, his colleague the Managing Director of a local web/systems development house Magma Digital.

Aside from lots of off-topic developer talk (it had to happen!) the topic still managed to engage all participants in debate on social media in general; use of Twitter for building and sustaining community and the importance (for companies looking to use social networks) of having real people behind the account, not a brand.

While adherence to the topic waxed and waned, there was no doubting the value that the topic, and Preston Tweetup itself brought to its varied participants. Some attendees had notched up thousands of tweets over a number of years, while others were new to consuming or participating in network-mediated communities, some posting their first Tweet on the night.

Evidence of how offline communities may be strengthened by on-line ones? I heard of and signed up for Preston Tweetup online; engrossed in conversation on the night I posted few tweets but gained new friends online from those around me, and was pleased to meet in-the-flesh one person I’d known of (for a number of years) solely from the online developer community.

All told it was a great night, at a great venue. I hope Preston Tweetup’s fourth incarnation is not too long coming.

code and effect

@AM_Doherty