Craig Rowe

April 03, 2012 18:30

Finally it's here

For the last few weeks I've been pulling together the concept of 'The Barn'. Ostensibly it's a company blog, but to me it's a bit nicer than that.

In drafting up the 'about' page I defined it as 'Headscapers not Headscape' and that's my hope. The intention is that there is a clear Headscape tie in - Articles and content will relate strongly to what we're doing at Headscape, how and when. This allows us to talk openly about clients and particular implementations we've done, perhaps more so than we would have done on personal sites. However it's not intended as a press release mechanism, nor an enforced 'write an article for every project you do'.

The articles will be written by all Headscapers. That means the scope will be broad. But if you are more code focused simply follow the code category or authors such as Dan and I. If design's your thing follow Ed or Chris. The design (pixels!)Once again our designer Ed has done an awesome job both with handling my demands and coming up with some great pixel artwork for the header. I'm still staring at it now - one day I will find Wally in there I'm sure.Check it outPlease do check out the site. We've tried to avoid a classic 'launch with no content' scenario and have filled in a bunch of stuff including some downloads, code and articles. My launch articles are: Rule based themes - WP Plugin, Using Domain Events and Unit-testing - first steps. Although dated to match when they were relevant to projects these are pretty much freshly written so please do let me know what you think.

March 08, 2012 10:40

My mobile phone is an extension of me. Everything I do in my day to day life is through my phone in some form. It holds my photos, my music, my videos, my calendar, my email. I interact with my social networks through it, I answer life’s little questions with it. I kill time with [...]

March 07, 2012 22:30

This time with added hackspace.

Having made the trip twice before I was looking forward to Barcamp Bournemouth. It's probably my favourite small event. Partly because it's so close, partly because it's a great venue but mainly because there's always something interesting and new (at least new to me) going on.

This year Mozilla Developer Network had added a new element into the mix by sponsoring and providing gamepads for a hack space. But that wasn't the only difference. There was, at least in my now old man eyes, many more younger attendees than before which led to some interesting discussions - ranging from the validity and credibility of our professional body, the BCS, to interesting views on getting a job and what the best smart phone is.

As a career long member of the BCS it was interesting to get involved in debating its usefulness during the discussion led by Tom. My personal view is that it's very london centric with too broad a remit to be of more use to someone than the independent, specific events/groups that are available. It's power comes however in being a 'force for our interests' at a governmental/lobbying level. For example, in recent work pushing for computer science rather than an MS Office based IT curriculum.

It would appear that many of the attendees also felt that it was irrelevant to (particularly web, as was the nature of the audience) development job applications and it's accreditation of degrees was not particularly seen as the 'gold standard' as the organisation maybe hopes.

By far the most memorable thing from this years event was the Hack created by Syd and Ad.

Having retired to the comfort of my own bed late on Saturday night I returned to find that Syd and Adam had spent the night knocking up a pretty impressive demo using an arduino, mac, ruby, objective-c, LED combo. The device was able to display an 8 by 8 grid of lights based either upon a website control or by reading tweets marked with the #bcbomo4 hashtag (using the now readily available Lawrence Sans font).

Whether it was down to that, or the talk by Syd (that I'm now referring to as the 'make awesome shit' talk) I knocked up a tiny hack myself afterward. In fact I'd hate to say it was actually inspired by cocks, but maybe it was. While various attendees were fighting for control to draw phallic symbols on the 8x8 grid I thought it'd be kinda cool to be able to create such a dot matrix style picture based on an image.

Written in JS and using canvas this little tool now lives here and here. It will take an image from a remote online location and transpose it into a grid of coloured or black and white dots. Not particularly useful, but kinda fun - and that's the whole point really.

February 29, 2012 14:11

I thought that it was about time that I practised what I preached and so Dootrix (my mobile development agency) has a brand new responsive website. That is pretty much all there is to this story, other than, ooo, isn’t it shiny and resizable! If you are in need of any mobile development work or just want to [...]

February 23, 2012 16:17

Dootrix have been working with the nice people at Simpl on their new website building app. The launch is not to far away now and they produced this little video to wet your apetite. I’ll post more detail on what went into the project after it’s launch early next month. Check out simpl.com for more [...]