Greycastle
not just code
Building products is hard, building good products, even harder.
Here you’ll find my hardships and experience described, in snippets, rants and software.
What do I do?
Build software
I’ve been coding professionally since 2008, more than 10 years now. I have been working both as an employee and contractor in public and private sector.
I’ve done desktop clients, web clients, batch processing systems and backends.
Improve
Since I wrote my first lines of Visual Basic code in my school days I have used many different languages and frameworks. I have found that coding is about more than the actual code though. I constantly try to improve both within and without the confines of the IDE to better myself in the hard and the soft parts of that which is the engineering craft.
Help out
Finally, though I do enjoy to tinkering on my own, building real products is seldom one man show. As such, I believe that it is incredibly important to work together and share knowledge. Which is what this blog is partly about. Giving back to the community that’s given me so much.
Sharing is caring
There are so many brilliant people out there in the world. Since I started developing I’ve been saved so many times by both framework creators and the StackOverflow community alike. I’ve a huge respect for the open source community and everyone that simply gives without asking anything back. So I want to do the same. I want to share both my experience in the form of my thoughts and experiences in this blog and also the code I put together.
Past projects
Some stuff I’ve written and I’d love for you use
It’s not much but in my free time I’ve put together a few projects that are still alive. I’m thrilled to see anyone using the stuff I’ve written or even perusing it so if you can spare the time and effort.
The blog
BigQuery and firebase analytics cookbook
Firebase Analytics is an incredibly powerful tool to understand how users use your mobile or web app. The past year I have been using it to draw insights and help prioritise and improve various functions in our team. Firebase Analytics is mostly good for collecting...
How to download a list of URLs using bash
Shell (or Bash as it is sometimes called), is the command line prompt of Unix-based systems such as Ubuntu or MacOS and, as we will see today, it can be a huge friend of yours. I have had the pleasure to work with some kings of bash and I was truly amazed bu what they...
Data merge with SVG in the browser
Taking a source data set, say a CSV with rows of data, and generating a list of pictures or emails inserting these rows of data into a template is commonly called mail merge or data merge. Every so often I find myself wanting to do this. The first time was years ago,...