A project that I’ve been meaning to work on for a while was a collection point for bulk IoT device data using AWS. Having had fun with various small, non-PC devices like Arduinos, it made sense to see if I could use these devices to send data of interest and build a collection point for…

The challenge: process 100 years of newspaper articles related to Scottish associations in Vancouver to try to make sense of what each means. My wife is currently working on her Master’s dissertation in family and local history and exploring the Scottish association culture in Vancouver. Much of the association history in the city spans from…

Recently I ran into the following dreaded error when trying to save a Block Editor’ed post: the response is not a valid JSON response I had just started testing the Gutenberg block editor on the site, and one of the often-mentioned troubleshooting steps was to disable plugins (All WordPress troubleshooting seems to eventually boil down…

I recently ran into a situation where I wanted to hold off upgrading to MacOS 10.15 (Catalina) but needed to develop and test on my iPhone XS running iOS 13.5, which requires Xcode 10.4 that only runs on Catalina. When running an app on the iPhone (rather than the simulator) in this situation, Xcode displayed…

Moving on from developing .NET using Visual Studio Community Mac, I started working on the necessary configuration for actually running on a Mac host (and by extension, a non-Windows host). The main task here is to configure Nginx to assist Kestrel (the .NET Core web server). Kestrel currently excels are running the .NET Core application…

I’ve started playing with Visual Studio 2017 on the Mac, pulling across a sample MVC Core + Entity Framework Core tutorial project on the Microsoft site. The tutorial can be found here. I run a Windows in a VirtualBox VM on the Mac, so I have a full Windows 10 + VS 2017 Community install with…

I was finishing off phasing in new content and features of my latest project, the Surrey International Writers’ Conference (www.siwc.ca) website when some reports came in of problems with the published dates of the various writing workshops being held. Workshops all adhere to a common schedule for each day of the 4-day conference, so I created…

I’ve been asked this quite a number of times recently – should a web developer learn JQuery or Javascript first?  And presumably pick up the other later. This question would likely apply to other Javascript libraries or frameworks (e.g. Bootstrap). In other words, does starting with the fun and useful application of Javascript (JQuery) and seeing web pages…

Since I’ve been involved in coaching at BCIT, I’ve started to get a better insight into the learning processes and tools required to get a grasp of ‘programming stuff’. Programming isn’t easy by any stretch, so I may not be able to nail exactly what it is that may be that single ‘aha’ moment of…