Freelancing mistakes to avoid
Over the course of the past few years as a freelancer I've made, and learned from, a number of mistakes. I cover these in my Life as a coin-operated monkey…
Work/life balance lessons
Over the course of 2018 I made a number of tweaks to how I work in order to try and obtain a better work/life balance. Most of them have been…
Security support for PHP 5 ends this year
If you have an application or hosting solution which was set up several years ago, there's a reasonable chance that you are still running PHP 5. Security support for 5.6,…
Opening winmail.dat files from Outlook attachments
Occasionally I receive emails from people which have a single attachment named winmail.dat. After a bit of searching online, it turns out that Microsoft Outlook, depending on how it is…
Git commits made directly to branch
Sometimes in Git I'll need to synchronise a long-lived feature branch with master to reduce the likelihood of merge conflicts at a later date. One of the problems with doing…
Advice from a computer science graduate
In the coming weeks there will be an influx of new students starting their computer science degrees. I was in that situation 15 years ago when I started at the…
Ubuntu security podcast
The Ubuntu security team have recently started the Ubuntu Security Podcast. Released every week and lasting around 10 minutes, the podcast features a round-up of the Ubuntu security news. It's…
Recruitment done differently
If you follow me on Twitter or have read my Why I don't work with recruiters post, you'll be aware that I have had a terrible experience with the recruitment…
Converting HTML input fields to uppercase
One task which I've found myself implementing several times is converting data entered by a user in a form field to a canonical format, e.g. uppercase. The jQuery for this…
Post-Brexit business planning
Whether you voted Leave, Remain, or not at all, business owners need to prepare for the UK leaving the EU in March 2019, either with a withdrawal agreement or the…