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
What is #NoProjects and #NoEstimates Actually All About
The #NoEstimates twitter hashtag has been a battleground of opinions, a similar situation has also existed around the #NoProjects tag on twitter. Why have these topics polarised some people so much? What are these discussions all about? Has this public… Read More
Software Can be Tested to Death – When Testing is No Longer Effective
Users soon stop using unreliable software if they have a choice and testing would seem to be the obvious fix for this; but testing costs money to do and even automated tests have to be maintained, so add to the… Read More
How to Run a Code Club – We’re Hosting a Volunteer Session at our Offices
We’re hosting a Code Club community training evening to allow anyone who is thinking of becoming a Code Club volunteer an opportunity to find out more about Code Club and get an insight into what to expect and how to… 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
ASP.NET MVC on Ubuntu with NGINX
We’ve just published an early working version of an on-line service created by NewRedo, however, although written in ASP.NET MVC 2, it’s not running on a Microsoft server. Instead we’re running on Ubuntu 11.10 using the NGINX web server. First,… Read More