The easiest way to save money and time building software products is to only build things that are absolutely essential. More features and frameworks means more code to write, more code to test and more code to go wrong. The… Read More
Developing HTML Forms
Developing useful and professional HTML forms requires a lot more work than simple examples might suggest. There are a whole range of problems such as handling initial data, client-side validation, server-side validation, optimistic concurrency and performing the final action. This… Read More
TDD or Test Driven Development Explained
TDD or Test Driven Development is something that’s easy to talk about but harder to do and a lot harder to do well and get value from. Done with good judgement TDD can help produce excellent quality code that is… Read More
Quick and Dirty Swap File (Linux)
Need a swap file on a Virtual Machine that didn’t come with one? Don’t care about the size, name or location? This is for you… I use lots of tiny virtual servers for development and testing and on most hosting… Read More
Shrink QEMU/QCOW2 Images
Needed to shrink a full directory of QEMU QCOW2 images today that had grown over time with snapshots and general use. While there is information around on the web about it, the focus is on single images and the code… Read More
An Overview of Hexangonal Architectures with Ian Cooper
Hexagonal architecture or ports and adaptors as it is sometimes called, is a design pattern applied to software applications that attempts to separate core functionality and business rules, often called the domain model, from the interfaces used to interact with… Read More
Building a Test Email Server
This post explains how to set up an email server on GNU/Linux that can be used for testing applications. It allows you to test that emails are correctly addressed (except for BCC) and allows you to receive the emails and… Read More
Recent Documents First in Apache Lucene
Having spent a long time looking for how to put the latest documents first in Apache Lucene to no avail. Finally, I’ve found a solution that works. Most of the answers on the web suggested using a boost on documents… Read More
Knockout JS Validation using an AJAX Callback Result
I was looking for an easy way to implement a validation based on the result of an AJAX request without making it synchronous. I noticed that Knockout JS Validation wraps it’s calls to validation functions in a computed observable. This… Read More
NGINX and Mono Concurrency
I stumbled upon a question about fastcgi-mono-server concurrency on Server Fault and thought I’d do some digging around. Initial checks using a couple of open tabs in the browser and Firebug seemed like there was some level of blocking, and… Read More
