I love commercials, everything from local to infomercials, and my recent move to the UK has opened up a whole new world of them. So, you can imagine my excitement when I discovered the major UK retailers compete for the best holiday commercial. Here are the best I've seen from 2016. Waitrose (grocery) John Lewis (department store) Aldi (grocery) Sainsbury (grocery) Marks & Spencer (grocery/department) Tesco (grocery) Allegro (auction site) - from Poland, but still in the xmas theme
I'm a huge fan of the Swarm mobile app. If you're not familiar with Swarm, it's an app for checking into venues, built by Foursquare, that makes your everyday travels into a competitive game. By checking-in to new venus, in new locations, more frequently (among other factors) you earn (virtual) coins, and win the game by outscoring your friends each week. The coins are used to purchase virtual stickers which are used to enhance check-ins. For example, once you've upgraded the Jetsetter sticker using it at Airport check-ins will multiply the coin bonus by 2 or 3 times. Coins can also be used to purchase 'perks' at participating venues. So, you go about your day you check-in to venues via the Swarm app, that's the easy
Promises offer a much easier pattern for handling asynchronous requests. Compared to the callback pattern Promises allow for much cleaner and maintainable code. A common pattern encountered when working with APIs is the need to do several requests at once, and return all the data in a single response. For example: Imagine an app where you've requested users who have Liked a photo on Instagram. This can be accomplished with a GET request to /media/[media-id]/likes. The response will be an shallow array of users: { "data": [{ "username": "jack", "first_name": "Jack", "last_name": "Dorsey", "type": "user", "id": "66" }, { "username": "sammyjack&
This past weekend I installed a SSL Certificate onto a DigitalOcean Droplet (Ubuntu/Apache). The droplet runs a little side-project of mine - a fan site for the Swarm app where I test and try ideas, frameworks and technologies. During installation I encountered a few hiccups so hopefully this can save some others some time. Generate a CSR and Private Key The first step is to create a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) and private key on your server. DigitalOcean provides a great how-to on this process. In short, you'll run an openssl command, answer a few questions and then a .csr and .key file will be created. Purchase a SSL Certificate If you're new to the SSL world you're in for a wild ride. When you
Themes for Multiple Teams As a remote developer/teacher Slack is one my most important tools. There are 5 teams I communicate with on a regular basis: Developers/PMs at Citrusbyte Developers/PMs for our primary client Students at Thinkful Mentors and admins at Thinkful The local Bozeman JS Meetup group In addition to these core 5 I routinely join other teams when I'm looking for support on issues. That is, many companies use Slack as a support channel so I temporarily join teams when needed. With 5 (or more) teams it starts to get a bit busy on the Slack app. At any given time I might have 1 or more ongoing conversations, and with that comes the potential for me to send an errant