jamesRaybould

Has anyone tried to do a GDPR request yet to either see what data they actually hold, or to test the right to erasure?

I'm fond of "A Fire Upon the Deep" by Vernor Vinge, and its kind of prequel "A Deepness in the Sky", they both contain some great ideas and I love the fact they have some very alien aliens!

Oh and if you haven't read any Douglas Adams "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" is fantastic

Working in a team where the senior engineer let me fail.

We were working on a fairly large new system and I had an idea about how I wanted to do something. We discussed the pros and cons and afterwards he sat down and said to me "If you do it like this you'll have problems when you want to refactor it in the future, but if you want to do it that way go ahead". I went ahead and did it my way, he was exactly right and I learnt a very valuable lesson in application design, architecture, and how to lead people in the future.

I like to think that now in all the teams I lead that failure is always an option.

We use a few languages in our apps but for the ruby apps we use rerun in our docker-compose files (https://github.com/alexch/rerun) like so:

`rerun --background -- "foreman start"`

It is super simple and works well for us

https://developer.github.com/v3/issues/#create-an-issue gives a bit of list of things that can be set, when using it as a link title isn't required. I can't for the life of me remember where I first saw it so I am pretty sure someone else deserves credit!

I don't think so, it seems like its just a link to what you can see within the UI anyway and simply pre selects it for you. But I am by no means an expert on it and it is pretty simple to experiment with if you want to give it a try

Admittedly we use it on private repos so we haven't seen an issue with it, but there isn't anything from stopping you putting the link in other places

There is already a way of doing this using the URL like: https://github.com/jamesRaybould/go-mssqldb/issues/new?body=...

You can then add it as a simple href to the readme.md.

It also means that you can have multiple templates depending on what a user wants to do, just by having multiple links and changing the content of the `body` parameter.

Simplest way to get going on this is to use http://urldecode.org to write the markdown you want and then hit the encode button, take the result and add it after `body=`

We also use it to auto-assign labels using `labels=` in the URL

We are looking at using Docker to help make our dev environments a little bit more sane. We deploy to Heroku so we use the Heroku docker image to give us (what is hopefully) as close to production environment in dev as possible. I have got docker working in a proof of concept project but the performance on OSX when using volumes, so you can actually dev on it, pretty terrible.

I guess this would be the docker image in question? https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/microsoft/aspnet/

I love my fitbit and wear it pretty much religiously, it tracks how much I move in a day and how much I sleep, but 2 things irk me about it. It is constantly broadcasting my location via bluetooth LE. You have to have an internet connection to retrieve any data from it.

As a software dev I'd love to get my raw data out just to see what fun an interesting things I could do/see with it. When I have asked in the past they have turned me down flat saying that they don't provide access to the raw data because people could "figure out how we calculate our raw data and algorithms, so this data is all proprietary"

I've been using OSM with first Cloudmade and then Mapquest for an internal project at work and my experience is mixed.

The most notable difference in terms of quality that I have personally noticed is that the geocoding on the OSM side of things is of wildly variable. The Cloudmade v1 Geocoding API was simpler and returned better results that the Cloudmade v2 API, but the data returned in v1 had less detail that the data returned in v2.

Mapquest offer a licensed data geocode and an open data geocode. The licensed data geocode, as you would expect, returns better results than the open data geocode but still fell short of both the ease of use and accuracy of the v1 Cloudmade geocode.

The kicker in all of this is that Cloudmade recently changed the way they choose to do business. That meant that my internal application wouldn't generate enough hits to the the Cloudmade servers to continue to keep the account open. We were literally in a situation of wanting to throw a small chunk of money at Cloudmade but because we couldn't meet a seemingly arbitrary lower limit we couldn't, abandoned Cloudmade and moved everything across to Mapquest.

Also I'd just like to call out that Leaflet.js is a fantastic library to use and allows us to do everything we want to do to the maps with an absolute minimum of fuss. We are looking at adding internal floor plans to some of the maps and I managed to throw together a PoC in leaflet.js that is looking like it would easily support this with a minimum of fuss.

I agree that insulating against human fault is always a good thing to do but at some point you must trust your team to do the right thing. In fact in using a 3rd party you are trusting that said 3rd party also has a form of human fault tolerance.

That said I cannot imagine even the most incompetent team making a change to the status page, which I would always host on completely separate infrastructure, at the same time as the rest of production infrastructure.

Surely its not about outsourcing a status page but just making sure that it is on completely different infrastructure?

Having a quick poke around and I notice that they are storing all exceptions in an SQL database. I've been looking at storing all the errors we get in our various applications in a central repository and was wondering what the general consensus was?

Currently I'm going a centralised logstash server and using a logstash shipper on each of my servers to push the exceptions, from a standard logfile to it. I was toying with the idea of pushing all my errors at source to an SQL database but figured if I was having database problems I'd be missing all the exceptions that I could be using to trigger the alerts that I'm having database problems!

I don't suppose you have a jsperf link to contrast and compare? I'm assuming swapping between the 2 isn't all that straightforward?

That looks a hell of a lot like underscore.js templates (http://underscorejs.org/#template) to me. What would be the advantage if I was to make the swap?

If you dig back to the last tech radar (http://thoughtworks.fileburst.com/assets/technology-radar-oc...) you'll find the narrative for why Backbone.js was moved to the 'hold' category.

I'm also curious how they got the wifi scanning working on iOS, last time I looked at doing it myself Apple had moved/removed the private library in iOS5.

I had a similar problem until today when I saw in the release notes you can turn off the gravatar icons that appear in each of the commits.

Doing this I found that the entire interface was much more responsive.

Thanks for that its really appreciated!

I'm in the middle of a short build (~5 days) mobile app that is using app cache and annoyingly I can't see to get it working on iOS, all the standard web browsers seem fine but iOS is being a PITA. I don't suppose you have any top tips?

That said more technical details would be awesome - I'd love to see how other people are doing things like this!

It appears that you spelt minutes wrong. Just take a look at the massive fire sale that revolved around the HP Touchpad and I think thats the kind of interest this will receive.

Seems like perfect work fodder for me - If I manage to remember in the morning I'll be looking to sign up.

This riles me every time I hear about it. I remember just watching one of the parliamentary committees on BBC Parliament and thinking why the hell are these people in charge of the biggest IT project in Britain.

I often wonder why open-source can't provide a good and cheap solution to this NHS IT problem. I know I'd happily work on something that will benefit the health of the entire population. I don't find it too hard to imagine that there are lots of other developers out there who feel the same way I do.

I'm glad there are other developers out there who have decided that they want to look smart. My usual work attire is: shirt, jumper, smart trousers, and smart shoes while the rest of the team tend to turn up in t-shirts, jeans and trainers.

I was asked recently why I always choose to come to work dressed smartly and my answer? "Look smart, think smart"

Yet again proving we live in 'rip off Britain'

As part of my degree I had to work in a team developing on some ancient Dell PDA that ran a crippled version of Java 1.4 so I can feel your pain. My favourite bit was having to pull out the SD card from my machine, insert it into the device, run the code then plug it back into my machine to pull my logs so I could see what just happened!

As a fairly recent graduate (just over a year now) I'd like to say, please stop giving us things to distract us in lectures.

One small point - I found it quite hard to read. When I first saw it I assumed it was just some type of tag cloud until I realised that the link on the left is the category.

Also any plans for having it so that I can start with a language, get a list of data-stores that can talk to my chosen language, then get a list of web-servers and so on until I've chosen my stack. Then building on this it would be great if I could get all the API's for the chosen stack!

Thanks for the great little tool!