All Opinions In Beta

I write Java/Kotlin/React.

Jun 26, 2019

Adding keyboard shortcuts in React

Adding keyboard shortcuts in React Keyboard shortcuts are a great feature for your React app. They help power users to get the most from your application, and can greatly reduce...

Jun 25, 2019

Adding keyboard shortcuts in React

Keyboard shortcuts are a great feature for your React app. They help power users to get the most from your application, and can greatly reduce the time spent navigating menus...

Jun 17, 2019

Nested ternary statements in React components

After discovering our ESLinter hasn’t been running for some time I’ve spent most of today going through trying to fix a whole bunch of eslint and a11y issues in our...

Jun 12, 2019

Migrating a blog from Wordpress to Jekyll

Migrating a blog from Wordpress to Jekyll So I’ve decided it’s time to start writing again. As a result since taking this decision I’ve done everything I can to procrastinate...

Apr 7, 2016

Constructor Vs Setter: A Better Way

This post originally appeared on DZone at https://dzone.com/articles/constructor-vs-getter-a-better-way One of my jobs as a Zone Leader at DZone is to syndicate content; that is, read posts from the giant firehose of...

Feb 27, 2016

Continuous Deployment With Heroku and Github

This post originally appeared on DZone. The movement to Continuous Deployment (CD) has been gathering speed and is widely acknowledged as the way to go. Code is checked in, an...

Feb 25, 2016

Your Application Probably Doesn’t Need a Database

This post originally appeared on Dzone here. Ok, I’m being a little facetious here, but it’s certainly my default position. Developers seem to love to integrate databases into their applications...

Feb 8, 2016

It’s all so quiet

Hello! The blog hasn’t been silent because I’m lazy or busy; A few months ago I became a Zone Leader for Dzone.com.  This has me churning 3 articles a week...

May 31, 2015

Accessing Amazons Product API using Clojure

I recently embarked upon a new project with some friends called Swirl (swrl.co). We decided to write it in Clojure; we’re all Java developers by trade but wanted to give clojure...

Mar 21, 2015

How to “Maker” you tests clear

Tests should be your primary means of documentation in a system. I like to think we’ve all moved passed the idea of using comments in code (except for APIs), and...

May 5, 2014

Reasons I love IntelliJ #1

Recently I’ve been  interviewing a lot of candidates at work, most of whom use Eclipse and have very little experience with keyboard shortcuts that seem to be default with IntelliJ...

Mar 23, 2014

Why I hate Spring

When I started my career I really fell in love with Spring. I went long on it. I threw it into all of my projects. I even managed to chuck...

Mar 23, 2014

My First Hackathon

This is a picture of me on hour 30 of 37 with no sleep.  Mild hallucinations, lots of shouting at my laptop and volumes of coke zero.  No, this isn't...

Mar 23, 2014

Fighting information obesity

Hi. My name's Sam, I'm addicted to information and suffer from information obesity. I've always been a big fan of information, but I'd say I only started to gorge myself...

Mar 23, 2014

Stormfly; A PC on your wrist

I'm a huge fan of the kickstarter concept. As well as allowing technologies to exist that may not have without it, it allows me as a geek to get in...

Mar 23, 2014

Technology & Innovation; The Future of Banking Conference

I was fortunate enough this week to attend the "Technology & innovation- the future of banking" conference held at the renaissance hotel in Wanchai by FST media.  The conference consisted...

Mar 23, 2014

Dipping my toes in Node.js

Having played around a little with Node before in hack projects at work, I wanted to have a proper dive and get my hands a bit dirtier. As a result,...

Mar 23, 2014

Corkboard: Online image pasting/collage making

So this weekend inspired by a project a couple of friends are doing I decided I fancied hacking around with the HTML5 paste API.  This quickly and rapidly turned into...

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