2022 What Happened?

As 2022 draws to a close its time to do my annual look back at what happened. I am going to talk a bit about my personal life as well as tech things, so if that is not your bag feel free to skip this post and read my more technical articles. January - I started the year teaching my son to code . February - I did some...

DDD North

On Saturday 3rd December I attended DDD North . It is a community run conference for Developers (the D’s stand for Developer) and I had a fab time there. Many conferences are going online which is great, however there is nothing quite like chatting over coffee or lunch with fellow Developers about the tech you are...

Upgrading to .Net 7

I have a Blazor application that was built with .Net Core 3, and I have updated it to .Net 5 and later .Net 6 when those versions of were released. In November .Net 7 is released so I have been testing it with the .Net 7 previews. However for this update I encountered a few more issues than I remember from the other...

MakeCode and the BBC micro:bit

Programming is in my DNA, so when I had children it was obvious that I would attempt to share my passion. It has taken a while, for some reason for loops don’t interest toddlers! However my 7 year old son has got a taste for it now. It was his birthday the other day and he got quite a few tech related things. First off...

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

I use keyboard shortcuts all the time, mostly without thinking, but they can be quite a time saver especially for frequently used tasks. I recently came across this list of Visual Studio ones. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/ide/default-keyboard-shortcuts-in-visual-studio?view=vs-2022 I was going to do a...

Diagrams with Mermaid

I have been wanting to produce a diagram of the architecture of my side project for some time, but I have put it off as never sure what the correct tools is for this job. Mermaid is a tool that lets you create diagrams from code and text. I first came across this tool about a year ago for use in a project. I had...

Scottish Summit 2022

On the 10th and 11th June 2022 Scottish Summit 2022 happened and I was there. It was an awesome event and I will attempt to summarise what happened. Thursday 9th On Thursday 9th I travelled down on the train full of excitement about the event. Once I got to the hotel, I was immediately greeted by James Cook , I was...

Scratch

My 6 year old boy has been playing with Scratch, so here is a quick introduction to what we have learnt about it. Scratch is a website that allows you to “code” by combining blocks together. This is how the scratch website describes its self Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding...