Development on Chris Harding

Building a calendar in Swift

Mon, 18 May 2020 18:02:03 +0000

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…

Setting up Netlify forms with Gatsby

Sat, 22 Feb 2020 15:49:03 +0000

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 .

Time hacking with the Trello API

Sat, 05 Oct 2019 17:16:03 +0000

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.

What I Found Playing With Azure Functions

Fri, 31 Aug 2018 11:13:03 +0000

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…

Domain Knowledge is King

Sat, 12 May 2018 11:32:03 +0000

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.