I love a good IT mystery! Who broke the system? Was it an innocuous software update? New hardware? Or was it a random cosmic-ray that flipped a bit in the datacenter? But — as always — the most important question is not who, but why did the system break? During…

Naming things well is one of the hard problems in computer science. I would argue it is even harder in the world of visual design. The reason it is hard is because visual designs continually change, so the UI code has to keep changing too. This article looks at an…

This article follows on from Migrating to GitHub Actions. In this article, I’m going to show you the steps needed to convert an NPM package from using CommonJS (CJS) modules, to the newer ES module (ESM) format. At the end is a list of resources I used to compose this…

GitHub Actions (GHA) is awesome, free, and very easy to get working. I’m going to walk you through how to convert a GitHub repo from using Travis CI to using GitHub Actions. Motivation Throughout my open-source career, I’ve relied on Travis CI to provide continuous integration services (test changes, produce builds…

M y name is Brett Uglow. I’m a software engineer… and a bot-writer. But I don’t want to be a bot-writer. I just want my data. This is the story of how I came to write web-bots, and why I’d rather not send my bots to your organisation’s website every…

Summary Building a CMS (Content Management System)-backed website involves finding a solution to one of the two hardest problems in computer science¹: cache invalidation. (The other hard problem being naming… and off-by-one errors). Many websites use content-delivery networks (CDNs) to cache content geographically close to their audience. Using a CDN improves…

Back at YOW Conference in 2018, I had the pleasure of listening to Neal Ford from ThoughtWorks, talking about Evolutionary Architecture. In a nutshell, this concept is about how to build software which can change over time, just as requirements and environments change over time. One of the sub-concepts was…

It’s 8:30am on Monday morning. Bob’s boss greets him. “Mornin’ Bob! Would you be able to take a look at this project — we just need to make a small change logic.” “No worries!”, says Bob, excited at the prospect of working on a something new. He get’s the repository…

I’ve just become a father — which is awesome! And I work for a great company (Mantel Group / DigIO) which has gone above and beyond to support our new family. So what does this have to do with time-tracking? Who loves time-tracking? Not me. DigIO is a leading IT consultancy in Australia, and I…