Lessons learned from a recent project

Earlier this year I had the pleasure of working with the Department for Education, Nimble and Paper on the Alpha and Beta phases of a Find & Explore tool for the National Pupil Database. Having reflected on that experience, here’s a few lessons I hope I can apply to future projects, in no particular order.

You can’t just waltz in at full speed

Complex organisations have complex processes. Take the time early on to…

Empower colleagues to solve their problems early to retain your development velocity

Hi Ryan, could you do me a favour and just confirm this user’s account please?

This request didn’t pop up in Slack in the first days of a new user confirmation feature. I was seeing this a couple of years later. The single line of Ruby was well known amongst the developers (it’s hardly rocket surgery) as we’d get a couple of requests a month, and…

Security is not a “pro“ feature

We rely on Open Source for a huge portion of the Internet (and beyond), yet many projects still rely on goodwill and donated effort in order to survive. Sometimes that’s not enough, and organisations like Ruby Together have helped to make critical pieces of developer infrastructure more sustainable. Other projects have taken the approach of introducing premium tiers, adding enhanced functionality to libraries, tools and services in an effort to…

There are many reasons why you might need to develop behind an HTTPS proxy, for example when testing integrations which behave differently based on the security of your site. This post describes how to add an nginx proxy to your docker setup.

Docker is great for building portable applications, modelling complex environments locally, and helping us bridge the gap between development and production, but installing your Bundler, Bower, NPM, Maven (and so on) dependencies can make builds slow. This post explains how to speed up your builds by seeding the image with most of your dependencies, so subsequent builds aren’t hampered by the ‘all-or-nothing’ approach to updating dependencies.

Edit (2019-04-23): Updated to replace compose_opacity with DstIn to preserve source image transparency. Thanks Chen Han!

Picture the scene: you have a few thousand users with avatars on your site. You want to change from a boring 4x3 photo to a cool and hip circular crop. You know it’ll look great for new users, but we don’t want to leave the existing ones behind.

A while ago I switched from using boot2docker directly to the Kitematic Mac app. Although Kitematic generally makes life a bit easier when managing Docker containers, it was a bit of a pain to get it running.

After the Kitematic installation, the VM started but Kitematic had trouble connecting to it. The error messages showed boot2docker paths so I made the assumption they’d got in a tangle. Uninstalling boot2docker didn’t entirely solve the problem,…

Building custom web views within LabKey is pretty straightforward, but if you find yourself needing to constrain the contents of your module horizontally you’ll quickly find that the surrounding tables will gladly stretch to any width. Fortunately restricting the width of hte container is pretty straightforward.

TL;DR: Wrap your contents in a table with table-layout: fixed; width: 100% and the contents won’t push the surrounding page to wider than the browser window.