Building a calendar in Swift

In this post, I wanted to walk through an approach I used when building a calendar view in Swift for an iOS app I’m working on. The requirements were as follows: Should start from the current day, and then scroll backwards through time Each month is it’s own section, with corresponding header Days should be a selectable square cell, and we should have 3 days on each row The grid should take up as much screen real estate as possible It should be memory efficient And with any luck, it will look something like this… ...

May 18, 2020 · 3 min

Setting up Netlify forms with Gatsby

I recently built a website using Gatsby , choosing to host it on the Netlify free tier. One of the features I wanted to try was form handling. Typically, handling form posts requires wiring up and hosting a backend to process requests. Netlify forms allows me deploy a simple static site with zero backend, letting them handle the rest for me. You can read more about the functionality here . ...

February 22, 2020 · 2 min

Time hacking with the Trello API

Following on from my post about using time effectively , I thought I would deep dive into a tool I created using the Trello API. The reason behind this work was that I had multiple Trello boards and projects in flight, each using a Kanban column layout. I needed a way to see all of the tickets I had in Ready or Progress states and there didn’t seem to be an obvious solution using Trello itself. I also just fancied having a play with their API. ...

October 5, 2019 · 3 min

What I Found Playing With Azure Functions

As promised all the way back in my NDC Wrap-up , I wanted to share my findings using Azure Functions on a recent project. As always, the story begins with a user requirement. The use case was to build a news monitor which would check a given list of sites and email through any new stories over the last day. My immediate thoughts turned to Azure Functions as a solution. Amongst other reasons, they are quick to spin up/code, would cost little-to-nothing to run and have built in support for timers, file monitors etc… ...

August 31, 2018 · 4 min

Domain Knowledge is King

There was once a King named Harold who ruled over a glorious Kingdom. His lands stretched from the highest mountains in the North, to the whitest beaches in the South. His people were a pleasant, happy bunch and this was driven from the top. Harold was a kind, generous king who served his people true and fair. He had grown his Kingdom through assimilation and was always keen to promote integration of cultures. Whenever he came knocking at the door of a new land, the locals would be happy to join Harold knowing they would lead a better life. ...

May 12, 2018 · 5 min