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Dirty Money: The Tory Millionaire Bankrolling Better Together

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 17:46:44 GMT

This is an article written by Michael Gray which was published by the National Collective and has been reproduced in full. It (and their website) are currently down due to legal action brought about by the subject of the article.

I don’t make any claim for its accuracy, I just really don’t like censorship. Read it. Make up your own mind.

Time for a new start

Wed, 20 Feb 2013 21:27:52 GMT

For the past two and a bit years I’ve been privileged to work with the fine folks at FreeAgent. I was employee number thirteen in a company that now has over sixty members of staff. It’s been great fun and I’ve learned lots and had tonnes of opportunities, like being able to speak internationally at conferences about subjects I care about, that I probably wouldn’t have had elsewhere.

At the same time as all this, I’ve been working on my own endeavour, The Happy Geek Ltd. For the most part, it’s been about me doing little bits of freelance work and serve as a way for me to scratch my itches and work on some secret projects.

It’s been a hard decision that I’ve been mulling over for ages, but the time’s come for me to break out and do my own thing for a while. I’m available for your freelance development and project management needs. I can cut Ruby with the best of them, PHP when I need to, I understand web application security (and scary things like PCI DSS compliance) and I’m not too bad at the dev-ops stuff either.

How we learn a language (From my SRC 2012 talk)

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 14:00:33 GMT

I was lucky enough recently to speak at the Scottish Ruby Conference in Edinburgh, this blog post is partially a transcript of my talk.

I’d like to open with a couple of questions, nothing too onerous – hands up if you came to Ruby from another programming language.

Most of the room, when asked, raised their hand to show that Ruby was the 2nd or later programming language that they had learned.

I’m quite opinionated on the subject of languages and language learning, and I’m going to be sharing some of my thoughts with you.

Like many (if not most) of you here, I speak a fair few languages:

English
Ruby
Japanese
Javascript
French
There are more…

Some of them I learned in a classroom, others in front of my computer, or by reading books or listening to mp3s / tapes. I guess most of you learned your languages using one or more of these methods.

I’ll be going into that a bit later.

A summer of conferences and speaking

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 01:12:50 GMT

This summer is set to be particularly thrilling for me this year.

First of all, I’m speaking at The Scottish Ruby Conference again, where I will be talking about how we as Engineers learn programming languages and about how we can apply those skills to become truly multi-lingual by learning an additional natural language.

I’m not sure when yet I’ll be placed on the schedule, but the conference takes place on the last weekend in June this year, on the 29th and 30th of July in Edinburgh.

On 'internet piracy' and 'copyright infringement'

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:57:55 GMT

This is a bit of a departure from the usual nature of my blog; but after the recent court ruling in the UK banning ‘The Pirate Bay’, I thought I’d throw my two-pence worth into the debate. You might also want to read James Ball’s article on The Guardian’s Comment is Free Blog.

The online community is full of ways to circumvent such ridiculous censorship measures, rendering the judgement practically impossible to enforce — but then; most of the tech community online already knew this, so I’m not really banging on about anything new.

Instead I’m going to talk explicitly about ‘infringement’, and focus on the ‘piracy’ of television programmes.

Rendering vertical Japanese text in a web browser using only CSS

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 20:21:37 GMT

The Japanese you read online is typically rendered horizontally and arranged for reading form left-to-right, much like in English. This is great - but there is also another, traditional way of writing Japanese - from right to left, top to bottom from the top right-hand corner of a page (or other point) down.

Typically this pretty vertical arrangement of text is used in books, poetry, newspapers and calligraphy but is generally avoided in print (except newspapers and magazines) and the web. One of the main reasons for its absence on the Internet is that the ability to render the text correctly is still beyond many web browsers.

I thought I’d have a go with using nothing but CSS and sensible markup to see if I could, at least, approximate vertically rendered Japanese text. If you just want to skip ahead, the finished example is here.

Reflections on the past year of running a Tech Startup

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 14:09:56 GMT

This post is about me coming to terms with, and understanding some of the mistakes I’ve made of the past year with my company, what I did about them, what I learned and how I’m going to ensure mistakes aren’t repeated.

It’s pretty personal. Writing honestly about where you’ve screwed up is always hard. I hope this helps other people to maybe avoid the same mistakes I’ve made. I certainly don’t come off looking too clever here, but for me, this post is to bring closure to a long period of self-doubt and hard reflection.

It's time for a change

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:19:59 GMT

This website has served me very well for quite some time, but now it’s starting to look rather dated and doesn’t really give away much about me, my interests or my personality.

That’s changing slowly, and I’m writing this entry to explain and chronicle how my approach of ‘Cultured Localisation’ is informing the reimagining of ryanstenhouse.eu and the design and engineering decisions I’m having to make.

I’m also taking a ‘Mobile First’ approach to the design, with the idea that no matter what device you visit this site on, you’ll always get the best possible experience.

Are you sure your CI setup is doing anything useful?

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 13:01:09 GMT

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how Continuous Integration (CI) is used, especially within large distributed teams and kept coming back to a lightning talk I delivered at the Scottish Ruby Conference in 2010.

It talked about the common strategy of running your CI tool off of your ‘master’ or ‘gold’ branch – which is probably the one that ends up going into production – once someone has pushed their code up to that branch of your repository. I’ll call that branch ‘deployable’.

The problem with that is that if someone on your team hasn’t, or couldn’t run your tests / build your application before pushing up – you’ve got broken code right there in the branch that should always be deployable and your CI tool going crazy.

A new job for the new year and speaking at SRC 2011

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 15:39:49 GMT

The coming year has me filled with excitement and a little trepidation. For one thing, I’m leaving the wonderful PCCL, where I have been privileged to work since January 2007 to join the team at FreeAgent Central.

This is a big change for me and it seems fitting that I’ll be starting the New Year in a shiny new job. I’ll deeply miss my friends and colleagues from PCCL and am grateful for nearly 4 great years of fun challenges, interesting work and a great working environment.

I’m going to be speaking at the 2011 Scottish Ruby Conference on the subject of the Payment Card Industry’s Data Security Standard (PCI DSS); a subject which has been a very intimate part of the last year of my professional life. If you’re coming along, come see me speak and I’ll talk about how you can use Free and Open Source Software to help reduce the cost of compliance.