I have some integration tests for a system that deploys PHP software to an Apache host via FTP(S) and SSH/SFTP transports. The tests run in a Docker image that has FTP and SSH servers installed, and they are stopped and started using shell scripts. This is a bit hacky, and it does not offer much […]

I’ve written a simple PHP script to keep an eye on mobile internet usage, and have open-sourced it under a MIT license for anyone who wants to have a play. It scrapes account data from a provider’s website and stores that data in a local SQLite database. This mini-project gave me an opportunity to play […]

Nearly three years ago, I wrote about the difficulties of finding programming roles without involving recruiters. The problem primarily is that high-quality direct roles are mostly pushed aside in search engine results in favour of highly cross-linked agency noise. A simple solution to this is a crawler system that specifically indexes no-agency roles from their […]

One of the risks of running a public website is that there are plenty of nefarious people – usually spammers and illicit marketers – who want to crack the security systems protecting it. There’s primarily two reasons for this: stealing email addresses of comments to add them to marketing databases, and gaining access to the […]

Rightly or wrongly, one of the primary reasons why new users get a difficult reception on Stack Overflow is sub-standard writing. This is sometimes due to the writer having English as a second language, and sometimes it down to laziness. Unfortunately, manual requests for improvement don’t always go well, which prompts me to think that […]

What is this about? Several of my blog posts are about Meshing, a P2P database layer for sharing structured data across the Internet. At the time of writing it is in a design and early implementation phase, and to guide the new reader, I’ve added this page. I’ll update it as time goes on, to […]