I spent this weekend in the Lake District in the wet north-west of England. A beautiful part of the world, but one lacking in 3G connectivity. Not great for browsing (although Mobile Twitter and email were fine) but fantastic for battery life.
On Sunday morning, I awoke to find an email from [...]

 
Sometimes you have a moment where you know that you’re on the right path.  
I was hunting through an archive of work done for Brightbox and found this message trail.  I had just tracked down a bug and posted a small screenshot of the fix.  
John’s response let me know that this would be a [...]

Google’s Chrome browser is making big waves on the Internet. “Watch out Microsoft, Google is coming to get you” they are saying.
But they are wrong.
Mozilla should be worried. Even Apple should be worried. But Microsoft should not.
You see, if Chrome is successful it will take search revenue (from the little online search [...]

It’s not your technical ability.  That’s a given, otherwise you wouldn’t be in this job would you?
It’s not finding a push-over client.  The client is busy and has their own problems to solve.  
It’s a combination of organisation, management and communication.  
Stay organised.  Always know what is outstanding, who is doing it and when it [...]

Sometimes, it’s worth stating the basics for all to see:

Follow the Model-View-Controller paradigm.  In particular, your views house your user-interface, your models handle the application and your controllers mediate between the two.  Controllers do not contain rules, conditionals dealing with business conditions, queries looking for objects related to the one in question.  All those things [...]

“Agile” software development states you should try and get software out in front of people as soon as possible. Specifications are just documents, software is real - and you can’t get feedback, see what works or improve until what you have is out in the real world. 37Signals, creators of Ruby on Rails [...]

Like a growing number of computer users, 3hv is an Apple Mac based company. Sometimes, this can lead to problems … most people use Microsoft Windows, which looks and works differently.
Never fear - since Apple switched to using Intel processors, companies such as VMWare and Parallels make it possible to run Mac software alongside [...]

Normally I wouldn’t talk about Ruby on Rails on this blog. That geek talk is found on the tech blog instead.
But, despite being about Rails, this isn’t a tech post. It’s about a problem that you will face when trying to hire a Rails developer.
Rails has a number of advantages.

It is a framework [...]

You know how it is - there are some things that you are just not comfortable without. My phone in my back pocket, my wallet in my front pocket, the key in the front door when I go to bed (just in case there’s a fire and we have to make a hasty exit), [...]

There appears to be a lot of gnashing of teeth regarding the non-existence of the iPhone SDK. Some are saying that it is proof that Apple are evil and out to get us. There are rumours that the iPhone is about to undergo a platform shift and his Steveness is just saving Apple [...]