Music to code to

Programming requires a good deal of concentration. I find that’s aided by the right kind of music. For me that generally means instrumental and predominantly (but not always) electronic. He’s a list of some albums that work for me. Music to code to: Volume One (A-C)

Divided we fall

Ask people why they believe what they do. Not to change their minds but simply to understand them better. Because listening to somebody and making them feel understood is one of the greatest gifts you can give.

Why I killed the cookie popup

You know that thing where every website you go to has a really annoying cookie popup that forces you to either ‘Accept all’ or scroll through a massive list of 3rd party companies who want your delicious data? Or maybe there’s a popup that doesn’t actually do anything but tells you that ‘Your continued use […]

Alreet planet?

I’ve finally made myself a proper website! Of course I’ve had personal/business sites before but for the past four years I’ve been without. I decided recently to fully embrace the idea of ‘me being me’ and not worry about having a business me and a personal me. And certainly not worry about any personal brand […]

Dry January AKA Giving up

This year, like an increasing number of people across the UK, I decided to give Dry January a go and give up alcohol for the month. I hadn’t actually given this much thought at all but Martin said he was going to do it and asked if I wanted to join in. I didn’t consider […]

Toast (or how to please your customers by making them do more)

A few years ago, on a sunny Winter’s morning, I walked into the breakfast room of a B&B. At first it seemed like any other British countryside establishment, but then I noticed the toasters. Toasters, you ask? Toasters. Every table in the little dining room had its own toaster with a loaf of bread sat […]

Do we need to handcraft websites anymore?

I certainly used to think that anything other than hand-crafting every element of a website was not playing the game properly. But why is this? I think there’s a certain feeling of pride that comes from hand-crafting something. But is that really what we’re doing?

Remove non-alphanumeric characters in Google Sheets

I recently found I needed to remove non-alphanumeric characters in Google Sheets. I had a column of text containing business names which I needed to format as URL friendly equivalents. For example, I needed to turn these: Into these: I achieved this by added the following formula into the top cell of a blank column. […]

Lessons I learned from the design of the NES

This week I was in the rare position to be able to learn about the design of the Nintendo Famicom (that’s the NES to us Westerners) from its designer Masayuki Uemura. He spoke for a couple of hours at The National Videogame Arcade in Nottingham. We heard about design decisions, successes and failures of the project from it’s inception in Japan to becoming a global phenomenon.

Creating a robust event search facility for Derby Museums

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here because I’ve been busy working on the prototype for the new Derby Museums website. The prototype has come together very well but there are always going to be a few head-scratching moments. For me, one of these centred around how to search and filter events. The […]