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
Generating Flutter package badges
I tend to automate the most basic tasks because it's more fun than copy-pasting. If I need to do something more than ~5x I'm like to write a script for it. This time I was writing a blog post comparing some Flutter packages and had to generate badges for each package....
Getting a Firebase JWT for testing
Why this? I use Firebase for many of my projects and a big reason is that it takes away the complexity of handling an authentication system for no cost. It integrates with google login for one thing immediately. That being said, writing a backend using this works...
Scraping HTML tables with Scrapy
Scraping tables The python Scrapy library is an excellent helper to build simple but powerful scrapers. It's common to want to scrape HTML tables when we scrape text of pages and as I'm going to show it really doesn't need to be difficult. The rough idea is to find a...