Manchester’s grassroots digital community is thriving. Last year I started http://technw.uk as a way to get all the event organisers together and create a single point of information for the community to discover all the events gong on in the area. On the site we currently have 11 conferences and 46 meetups. From social meetups,… Read More Manchester’s vibrant digital community

Manchester is mega-exciting at the moment. Along with everything Doug Ward‘s awesome work getting central government to put some money into Manchester, I also set up technw. technw is where I decided to get all the tech event organisers in the area together. We have a slack group so we can work together to make things… Read More technwuk – more info

In January I was invited to sit on the expert panel for Lean Agile Manchester. It was a great honour and a really interesting evening. A few days before the event, the organiser contact myself and fellow panelists to invite us to bring marketing or promotional materials along. This stumped myself and the other Allegro… Read More Marketing innovation

Where I talk about comics and the next steps in Devops http://www.thoughtworks.com/talks/introducing-netops-xconf-europe-2014 Thanks so much for putting the event on and inviting me Thoughtworks ^_^

Post HackManchester and acquisition week. Unfortunately I contracted a terrible flu which rendered me useless. I spent the week laying on the sofa under a duvet and feeling sorry for myself. On Thursday I attempted to work from home. It turned out the previous week I had made a breaking change and gone home for… Read More w/c 27th October 2014

Monday James had added some new environment variables to our development environment. I got the latest git repo out, ran the update and my Ubuntu VM died a death. I spent the day trying to get a new one up and running. The setup script and base VM had been created last summer, so were… Read More w/c 29th September

Busier week than usual! Monday saw an interesting evolution of the re-architecture of our core domain at work. As we’ve learned more about our domain, and started feeling the pain from the external layers of our system, James and I have figured that things aren’t quite right. It started off as a realisation that all our… Read More w/c 22nd September 2014

I’m going to nick a format from my lovely friend Jordan Hatch to action something I’ve been thinking about since reading Kevin Rutherford‘s posts…. I don’t blog enough. I don’t have the time. Mostly because my posts become long and heavy. Kevin’s posts are succint little nuggest that really get you thinking. Jordan’s weekly log books give… Read More New post format

I don’t know about you, but I found the transition from .NET and ruby over to JavaScript rather painful. There’s quite a few quirks along the way, but one of the hardest ones for me is the asyncronous nature of the code. Martin Fowler has put up a great post that explains all this in… Read More Testing with javascript