Five weeks ago my wife Sylvie and I sold all our furniture (and some clothes, appliances, and other stuff) put the majority of our remaining belongings into storage and moved out of our flat in southeast London. On each of our backs (and fronts) were a duffle and carry-on. Our only confirmed reservation was an Airbnb in eastern France for 5 weeks but our tentative plans called for being on the road much, much longer. As a result, our bags contained a mix of clothes for a trip to unknown destinations with an unknown timeline. The carry-ons contained the more important gear - 2 MacBooks, 2 iPads, 2 mobiles and a kit of chargers, cables, wifi router, hotspot device, and other gadgets. One of the only
Optimizing Ghost theme CSS files
I recently updated this site to Ghost v1.5.2 and took the chance to update the theme. The site now uses the Blacklist theme. Out of the box it's a pretty speedy theme with Google Pagespeed ranking it a 91 on Desktop and 74 on Mobile. The main issue for both tests is the optimization of the CSS files. That is, the themes loads 4-6 CSS/font files instead of bundling them into a single optimized CSS file. Since bundling files is dead simple these days I decided to spend a few minutes to make this optimization. Here's how. Let's Bundle First, navigate to your theme directory, located at: /ghost/content/themes/[theme-name] Then we need a tool to do the heavy lifting for us.
Turing Fest 2017 Summary - Day 2
The Road to Microservices and Beyond by Adrian Mouat @adrianmouat The 2-pizza rule - Development teams should be able to be fed by 2 pizzas. So no teams larger than 6-8 people. Any larger and communication becomes an issue. Trend is local hardware to cloud servers, monolithic architecture to micro services, and serverless Minor Bug Fixes by Rob Gill @rob_gill_ Nobody reads release notes for app updates because they're hidden behind a View More link as a result companies don't write informative release notes even large companies like Facebook Some companies do a great job - 1Password, Slack they include a TLDR bullet points The Perfect Release Note An introduction TLDR New / Improvements / Fixes A call to action to get feedback Going even further Localized
Turing Fest 2017 Summary - Day 1
Opening Remarks by Brian Corcoran @brianc13 1,300 people attending this years conference Attendees and speakers from all over the world Past the Initial Flywheel: What Companies Can Learn About Product Scaling by Supriya Uchil From RentalCars.com International expansion - merely changing the language isn't usually the solution Focus on tailoring the product for individual customers Intent Testing - small tests you can learn about customers to develop a strategy for expanding into new markets Are you creating a company or a legacy? People like Jobs, Bezos and Musk take more risks to create a legacy The Greatest Lies the Devil Ever Told to Startups by John Peebles @johnjpeebles From Mallzee.com / Administrate Talk about a small world - Administrate is headquartered in Edinburgh but
Crossbrowser Testing Localhost on Sauce Labs
Ran into a pesky bug on Internet Explorer 11 this past week. Being on a Mac, and without access to a machine that runs Windows 10 with Internet Explorer 11 I decided the easiest route was to use one of the cross-browser testing services. There are now a handful of them out there - Browserstack, Sauce Labs, Cross Browser Testing, among others. Most share a similar feature set - manual and automated testing of sites and apps, but there are some differences. For example, Sauce Labs offers Real Device testing - allowing you to upload a mobile application to test on actual devices. Anyway, I needed to test a local app running on localhost:3000 on IE11/Windows 10. In the past I've always used a