'HMRC: nearly three weeks up'

I’ve a spare half hour, a good chance to get some thoughts down on my new gig. I’m just coming to the end of my third week at HM Revenue & Customs, as part of the impressive Digital Delivery Centre (DDC) in Newcastle. There’s plenty of documented

Games are fun for everyone. (But not all games are fun at all.)

Sad times this morning, with news of the passing of undoubted games industry legend Satoru Iwata. This comes after a weekend when I finally reached the end of Jack N’ Jill on my Nexus 5. (It’s here on Google Play and over here on iTunes.) It’s rare these

The last Bradford CoderDojo of the 2014/15 academic year

With the school summer holiday looming we had July's Bradford Coder Dojo a little earlier in the month than usual. Given the proximity to the holidays and the decent weather it was an alright turn out as well. Good to see! Amongst the usual activities, a session on

How Spotify does agile

Answer: They empower teams, who are given more autonomy to decide what and how to build. That's the key point I take away from a great piece over on the ReQtest blog.

Going off

A couple of months back my daughter, my twelve-year-old daughter, went off on one. Threw a benny. Actually laid into me right proper. “Why are you here? You’re never here. You’re always working,” she screamed, scarily. “Why are you here now? We don’t need you here. We

View your local Scores on the Doors

This weekend's "hack" was inspired by my ritual Friday night trip to my local curry house to pick up a takeaway. The routine: I walk to the curry house, order the curry, nip to Symposium for an ale while it cooks, pick up curry, go home,

Bradford District STEM networking event, June 2015

I popped by the National Media Museum late this afternoon to hear about STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) activities the museum is running and leading for students, schools, and families, as well hearing from bodies outside of the museum.  In quite an up-front intro, the museum

'Better when relevant: improving the Hang My Washing Out tool'

I’ve been looking through some older work recently. Some of it purposely. Some of it accidentally. Purposely: I've been looking over stuff I've been involved with over the years. Sometimes it's good to reminisce. Accidentally: I was reminded this week of a little

How I learnt to code

I remember the first time I did a bit of computer programming on my own computer. It was 1987. I was 11, maybe 12. My family lived in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. My dad worked out there, because there were no jobs back home in Grimsby. Or no jobs that he

Look up your Amazon wishlist in a local library

Another Sunday, another little bit of a quick coding effort. Following last weekend's look up Amazon bestsellers in your library effort, I received a number of responses. If you took the time out to contact me, thank you! It's good to see something that's

Introducing Shipley's Code Cafe

This coming Saturday, I will be leading a trial in Shipley of something we are calling Code Cafe. The idea: Introduce coding to people over the age of 18. That’s it. And I can hear one or two of you reading this saying “Woah there! Just for people over

'Bradford Coder Dojo June 2015: Tasty Pi!'

Our monthly Bradford Coder Dojo was a bit busier than usual this weekend, at least for the mentors, with three sessions available to the kids that came along. Paul Scott ran a session on getting Raspberry Pis up and running (which I had chance to take part in!).  Shi and

A short note about prototyping

I like traveling by public transport. Aside from accidentally hearing Game of Thrones spoilers, I sometimes get to overhear design and creative chats. The benefits of the Shipley to Leeds commute, eh. I earwigged a conversation the other day, the general gist was creating visuals in Photoshop is the only

Look up Amazon bestsellers in the Leeds/Bradford library system

I had a quick half hour at the weekend to pull together a quick thing that sits between two big databases. Normally I’d call this a “hack”, but some of you might think that suggests something illegal. No laws were broken in the making of this thing! If we

'Leeds GovJam 2015: in just three points'

Here's a thing. My post-gig notes for Leeds GovJam weren't very big. Literally three points in my notebook. Here's the note.  To compare, usually when I go to "gigs", public or private, I get a good twenty down. I

Looking ahead to Leeds GovJam 2015

As I type this the 2015 Leeds GovJam is about to kick off. A quick note. Let’s jump back a couple of weeks. I talked at NUX in Leeds, a talk that covered a lot of bases. The crux though was how, in 2003, I actually enjoyed my switch

Exploring the lives of "older people" through the Age Camp unconference

The Monday just gone I attended Age Camp in Leeds. Some takeaway thoughts. It is worth disclosing up front I attended the event voluntarily in every sense. I was made aware of it by someone who thought I’d find it interesting. I wasn’t paid to attend. I gave

May 2015 NUX Leeds notes

So, my talk at NUX in Leeds is done and dusted. You can catch the slides at the bottom of this post. The summary of the whole thing was captured by Claire Gibbons in her photo above. A couple of people have dropped me a line to ask why I

'Pitches: I love to hate you (but love a good workshop)'

Ask anyone in an agency their views on pitches, and it's the thing everyone loves to hate - and hates to love. At the worst end they are viewed as a gamble, a drain on resources, the cause of much in-fighting (“We've only got three days

'Doing my own thing: nearly one year on'

With running “my own business” now just about hitting the one year mark, I've been looking over the stuff I put down a year back and since. Pictured: The Shrink Your Briefs class at Studio of Things. I've a collection of documents - business plans, road

The future could be ace, but we still need to think of IE8

A few weeks back we were looking into a new project. The old "Do we have to support IE8?" point came up. Chat with the client. Globally, IE accounts for just over half the "desktop" web traffic. IE8 is about 16%. This for a browser that

Why volunteer?

I updated my LinkedIn profile this morning, to reflect some of the "other stuff" I've been involved in recently. It's all the recent volunteer stuff I give time up for for nowt: mentoring at the Bradford CoderDojo and Young Rewired State in Leeds, steering

Scorsese on story versus plot

Following on from my talk at Forefront in Leeds back in November, I found a video on YouTube of an interesting chat between Jon Favreau and Martin Scorsese on Marty's preference of story over plot, or "rather because of character and a very different approach to story&

Getting Hyperlocal with young people in Leeds

This past Saturday I took time out from my weekend to inhabit that fuzzy space between “work” and “play”, this time helping out at the Leeds Young Rewired State Hyperlocal gig held at Leeds library. Some quick thoughts on that - before time and the event races away from me!

You say persona, I say person-ah

A couple of nights ago I presented at Forefront, a regular gathering in Leeds for people who work on and with the front-end of digital products, be they designers, coders, or people just interested in that sort of thang. At short notice I rustled together a talk entitled You say