Follies

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Idea A Day

Perhaps the one constant in becoming an expert in any particular craft is to do it regularly - preferably daily. For some disciplines e.g. skydiving and marathon running, this is prohibitive by being expensive or physically extreme. There are countless other more attainable skills, however, that demand only our time. The purpose of this blog - for me at least - is to provide a place for thoughts on software development in practice and the implementation of ideas. So often it becomes the natural place to trial a new technology but at the heart of every technology is the idea...

23 min readRead more →
The Difference Between Mean and Median
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The Difference Between Mean and Median

As a non-statistician who every now and then has to understand statistical concepts as if they were second nature, illustrative examples are like gold dust to me. I thought I'd share a small yet extreme sample set that I devised to aid me in understanding the difference between the first statistical moment, the mean, and the similar yet potentially wildly contrasting median. My problem with mathematical definitions Before I present my example, I'm going to get on my soapbox for a minute about the way some, often simple, mathematical concepts are taught. Skip to the next section if this is...

6 min readRead more →
From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection
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From Idea to Launch: A Website Dissection

What's New? MUSIC was recently launched, so for those of you who've already read about the idea, architecture and technology stack, you can go straight to the post-launch results and conclusions. For everyone else though... At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take...

25 min readRead more →
What's New? Music
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What's New? Music

At the beginning of the year I posed a conundrum on Twitter. I wanted some way to make sure I never missed out on a new release by one of the many bands I like. In the end, I had to build it myself. This would be my first website ever after a professional lifetime of enterprise code and it started something that would take up a large part of my free time for the next 9 months. I have created the website What's New? MUSIC. Here is my journey. The tweet - which no-one replied to - that started...

19 min readRead more →
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One year in...

Happy Anniversary! In updating my Fantasy Football League Team Selector Spreadsheet for the new Premier League season, I realised it's been over one year since the inception of this humble tech blog. I've gotten on my soap box a few times about how software development should be done, provided some programming tutorials and uploaded some executables with GPL sourcecode. I didn't know exactly what I wanted to achieve other than freshen up my tech skills but I feel it's given me so much more than I hoped it would. The plan for the next year is to get a bit...

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New Music - Part I
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New Music - Part I

Welcome back guys! Wow, it's really hard to get code out of the door when you've got to work full-time. Still, no matter, here is how I got on with my latest project: extending the previous one until it's bashed out into something a bit more useful. To give a bit more background on just what the previous blog post was about, it was an ASP application knocked up quickly over the course of a weekend to give me something to show for an interview I had with Scotland's premier web technology company, Skyscanner (setup via the awesome Quantum Recruitment...

6 min readRead more →