Sage Global Hackathon 2018

On Wednesday I had fun in leading a team in the 12 hour Sage Global Hackathon 2018, with teams competing globally in the UK, South Africa, France, Canada, Brazil and Spain. The main theme of the event was: "Delivering or consuming APIs, to improve product interoperability and extensibility, and drive associated efficiencies and growth". On …

Amazon Alexa Workshop

Today I was lucky enough to join an Amazon Alexa workshop in Newcastle ran by Jamie Grossman and Andrea Muttoni from Amazon AlexaDevs, covering some great topics including Render Templates, state and session management, Alexa Voice Profiles, Alexa for Business, localisation and the long awaited notifications (we may be waiting a little longer for this.... 🙂 ) As …

New features in MongoDB 3.6

MongoDB Europe 2017 This week I had front row seats at the MongoDB Europe 2017 conference in London to find out the exciting new features that have been added to the latest release 3.6. The new features have been grouped into the following categories by MongoDB: Speed to Develop: Change streams, retryable writes, tunable consistency, greater …

How to create an IoT/AI Slack Chat Bot

So what is IoT, AI, Slack & Bots anyway?.... Let's get started with a quick breakdown of what each of these are: IoT - According to Wikipedia IoT is defined as "The internet of things (IoT) is the network of physical devices, vehicles, buildings and other items—embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity …

Working with Sass in Visual Studio 2015

Introduction Sass is the perfect modern solution for maintaining many large complex CSS files, and keeping the CSS code DRY; with many developers using Sass now to overcome these maintenance problems. If you have never heard of Sass and want to learn more then look at the sections below. The official Sass website describes Sass as: Sass …

Speed up .NET development with the CodeDOM

How to speed up .NET development using the CodeDOM and Reflection I recently worked on an ASP.net AngularJS/WebAPI hybrid project which had around 45 models linked to SQL Server tables using Entity Framework (nothing too unusual there); and the requirements in the product backlog was to create files for each. I am not talking 45 different files here.. I am …

16 essential free resources for web developers

Which free resources do I keep going back to as a web developer or designer? I thought about that question a few days ago.. "Which resources do I keep going back to as a web developer?"... regardless of which web project I am working on. I have listed below the 16 I seem to always …