Blog

Get the innerText of an element in Scrapy
How do you get the innerText when using Scrapy? Short answer is, you don't. But by adding BeautifulSoup you can.

BigQuery and firebase analytics cookbook
Actual and practical BigQuery examples of how to get valuable data out from Firestore Analytics. Real example code.

How to download a list of URLs using bash

Data merge with SVG in the browser
In 2019 I was tasked to generate a file of tags in SVG from a CSV. I built a small tool using only browser tech and here is the code.

Gitlab CI Flutter with test reports in 15 minutes
Gitlab CI Flutter set up in only fifteen minutes. Let me show you how I did it and share my actual running Gitlab CI Flutter template.

Generating Flutter package badges
Using jQuery, a pub.dev open API endpoint and a CORS proxy to generate badges for flutter packages. A quick experiment in JS tooling.

Getting a Firebase JWT for testing
Struggling to find a Firebase JWT to test your backend with? Fear not, this Firebase JWT project will help you get there in a few clicks.

Scraping HTML tables with Scrapy
A simple one file utility class to help scrape html tables with Scrapy and get the output in rows of arrays or dictionaries.

Save time debugging Scrapy with shell
Cut down on debugging time by using Scrapy shell to quickly inspect and test your selectors.

XML as HTML using XSLT with Javascript in 30 minutes

Post-install hook for Podfile failing after upgrading to Flutter 2

Supporting iOS 14 with Admob

Hiring for JReader

How I report bugs
Reporting bugs effectively can really save developer time and help get bug fixes in faster. This is the format and tools I use

How to split a PR
Small PRs are great, but splitting them? Though worth your time it can be difficult. Let me share some examples.

Running flutter on AWS Device farm

Loading overlay in Flutter

Example of refactoring with proxy pattern
A practical example refactoring and using the proxy pattern. We use this code for performance tracing in the JReader map to log performance to Firebase.

Reloading future with flutter FutureBuilder
The Flutter FutureBuilder is a great way to render async operations but you need to take care if you want to reload or rerun the future. Here I'll show how.

How small PRs change everything – Lessons from the MoJ
How our team pull review culture transformed by aiming to keep pull requeests under 200 lines of code. Making reviews better, faster and less painful.

Nothing survives the first contact with users
I spent fourteen hours building an app only to have it killed in a few words during the first feedback session. But this was far from a failure.

Taking decisions and prioritising
Everyday we are taking decisions, some have bigger impact and requires more thought. How do we approach this and how do wee handle disagreement?

Introducing feature flags to Ruby on Rails
How feature flagging in ruby can be dead simple and still give you very benefits. But for complex cases, there are many feature toggle libraries as well.

Dealing with legacy code – Lessons from the Moj
Technical debt creeps into any software and only we as developers can keep it at bay. We battled legacy code at the MoJ and this is how we approached it.

Onboarding – Lessons from the MoJ
The first in a series of posts on things I learned during the Video Hearings project at the MoJ. This time, thoughts on to do a good onboarding.

How to show flutter test coverage in Gitlab CI
It is super easy to show flutter test coverage in gitlab ci merge requests using thlcov, genhtml and the coverage option.

Load testing with Azure test plan or alternatives
Thinking of Load Testing with Azure test plan? How does it stand up to alternatives such as JMeter or Gatling? Can you do performance testing with C#?

5 ways to become a better software engineer
Getting bored? Work stressing you out? Stuck at your current level? No pay-raise? Become a better software engineer, get hired, paid and rock your job.

MuCon 2019 Takeaways
My takeaways, things I picked up and reflected around during and after Skillsmatter's MuCon 2019. Should you choose microservices? "It depends".

Measure team code health using Github
Work Work Stats is a tool to measure team code health using Github stats. Looking at pull request size and life time we can glint how well dev is doing.

Speed up translation by automating google translate
An easy way to automate google translation. This post shows how to use node.js and gtranslate cli to quickly translate a json of country names.

TravelRates app released! A productive week with cold in Bali
Read the story how a week with cold in Bali can result in a mobile app software release to put in your personal portfolio and the things to learn from it.

Bulk change photo timestamps on mac

Interface segregation but what about our objects?

Severity is a priority, or was it the other way around

Communication in text

User stories and use cases

EnumerableExtension

Trying out NDepend

Tomato is a fruit!

WPF editable ComboBox binding

Hosting services easily on windows

MvvmLight and CanExecute

Loggly gotchas

Configuring Serilog from json

Slowness in Selenium RemoteWebDriver using Ruby on Windows

Jenkins with Visual Studio Online

Lazy day

Git credentials on Windows

Ruby and DRb

Event store growing but no data added?

Mark all mail as read in gmail

Alias for windows command line

Live Mine Field – Welcome in!

How do I (#,%-+ that integer/date/float?

Environment variables and too much scripting

My path registered EXE where art thou?

DataTemplate based on type in WPF

Passing string array from VBScript to C# COM class

Keeping it clean

VMWare problems with keyboard and mouse capture

Free coverage control in Visual Studio

Crayon syntax highlighter

IndentationSplitter

View model property generation

The Web We Want

Viewing registered COM interfaces and their signatures

Online .Net/C# regex validator/playground

Sort your list drag & drop in the web

Revoke impersonation in C#

SQL query statistics

Rounding or grouping datetime in SQL

Get all users in an active directory group

Debug silverlight in firefox

First entry in Play store – Track my Training

Snowball Excercise

Want to group by date? Cast to date!

Tools of trade – Get hostname by alias or ip

SQL Bottlenecks

Forcing checkout on files edited during offline

Saving binary fields to disk aswell as other neat stuff

Yield Return Dangerously Delicious

Comparing exact datetimes in entity framework

Copy from WPF Datagrid

Table variables in SQL Server – The dbo_reader´s friend

Table size

Dangerous cache

Converting binary data to text in TSQL

First pingback

Select on on TextBox Focus

Measure milliseconds when executing TSQL

Parsing IIS-logs to SQL

Concurrent client connections in C#

SkyDrive in 5 minutes, who would have guessed?

AnkhSVN

Different merge or diff tools with TFS

Make A Game

List the users connected to a MS Sql server

Telerik Installer – How it´s supposed to look

Entity Framework query sql

VS 2010 SP 1 Breaks SQL Server Management Studio Intellisense

A* algorithm

Pitfalls of threading – Always handle lost exceptions!

VSTO ShapeRange Error

VSTO to VBA and Back Again

WebClient service stuck in Stopping

XBAP Security Error

Skype is Microsoft

Website installation failed – The installer was interrupted before Application could be installed

VSTO-project Office target version

Yuml

Unique names for test output files
How to use the TestContext class and the currently running test name to generate unique names for test output files for better reusability.

Copy pure text from WPF DocumentViewer XPS
How to configure the wpf DocumentViewer to allow copying from xps to the clipboard by using command bindings and the Clipboard class.

Test framework and CodeCoverage plugin failure

Opening XPS-files

JustDecompile vs DotPeek

Abusing SEO

Byte order mark

Subclass type usage

Choose columns to link with SharePoint 2007

ConfigurationSections, validators and default values

WSSF CLS-compliant warning

Check if enumerable is empty?

Opening named configuration files in C#

Zipping folders with FastZip

Deleting the .suo

dotPeek

Textblocks and implicit labels in WPF

Stumbling in Linq

Visual Studio 2010 SP 1 Brittle?
