For a while I have been mentoring a friend and I thought I might share some top tips I have implemented in my career so far. Hard Work At school I was told: “Only in the dictionary does Success come before Work“. Yes it is a bit of a corny saying however it has stuck in my head and it’s true. If you want to get...

Who was your hero growing up? Mine was Stephen Hawking. What is a hero? A lot is said in the media about “Heroes”. Often the sportsperson of the hour is described as a hero. I don’t like this definition and I think there is far more to being a hero than that. One definition I saw describes a hero as A person who is...

New version of Pwned Pass

A new version of Pwned Pass is available from Google Play . A couple of weeks ago Troy Hunt released V2 of Pwned Pass onto his haveibeenpwned website. There are now over half a billion passwords that have appeared in data breaches for you to search. This time Troy has included information about how many times a...

The code base I am working on contains a huge if block. By huge I mean 77 if statements one after the other, each if checks to see what page id you are on and loads different content. This is not easy to maintain and I want to refactor it. One option would be to replace the if statements with a switch block. However...

A content Security Policy or CSP is a HTTP response header that defines what sources of content can be loaded on a web page. It is a way to combat Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. What is a XSS attack then? When you load a webpage it also loads various other resources like images, some css style sheets, various...

Earlier this year I signed up for pluralsight. If you want to sign up to pluralsight as well use this link http://referral.pluralsight.com/mQd8BJ4 to get money off. Pluralsight is a website that sells training videos on a wide variety of technical topics. You sign up for a monthly or annual subscription and you can...

I have blogged a few times about interfaces , and how useful they are for producing good quality maintainable code. Let’s look at a problem and the solution I came up with which I am quite proud of. As previously mentioned I am in the process of moving images from AWS to Azure blob storage. Now that the actual files...

We are in the process of moving our companies websites onto the Azure platform. One of the challenges was to move image files out of the website project into blob storage. This week I have moved 150,000 of them. One thing I keep banging on about is that your source code should not contain data. If it does every time...

Last week I looked at testing the UI of mobile apps , this week lets look at how we could do a similar thing for websites. Testing the user interface is not an excuse for a lack of unit tests . Testing the user interface takes longer so for keep creating your small unit tests that can be run after ever build. That said...