Steve Marshall

Quotes that inspire me

2025-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

People who know me will know that I can barely go five minutes without mentioning some pithy quote that I think fits the topic at hand. This is a list of the quotes that I find insightful or inspiring, and refer back to often. I may edit this post in future to add more.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, 'Terre des Hommes' (1939)

Wenniger aber besser (Less, but better)

Dieter Rams

Be curious, not judgmental.

Walt Whitman

Of the good leader, when the task is done, the people will say, “We did it ourselves”

Lao Tsu

He that is everywhere is nowhere.

Thomas Fuller, 17th-century scholar.

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry

A smooth sea never made a skilled sailor.

???

Stop knowing so much and listen.

???

I am not difficult, I am happy with the best.

Fernand Point, in Croque-en-Bouche by Fanny Deschamps (1976), translated by Jessica Green

Empty your mind. Be formless, shapeless, like water. You put water into a cup; it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle; it becomes the bottle. You put it into a teapot; it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow, or it can crash. Be water, my friend.

Bruce Lee (1971)

La cuisine, c’est quand les choses ont le goût de ce qu’elles sont. (Cooking is when things taste like what they are.)

Curnonsky

Drinks are for strangers, acquaintances, workmen and family. Meals are for family, close friends, honoured guests

anthropologist Mary Douglas

If you’re not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late

Reid Hoffman

Small rooms or dwellings discipline the mind, and large ones weaken it.

Leonardo da Vinci (via the FT)

God grant me the serenity To accept the things I cannot change, The courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

Mastering the fundamentals wont guarantee we win, but failing to master them will guarantee that we’ll lose

Unknown, allegedly an NBA coach (via Paul Reed Smith)

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

Goethe

When faced with a hard change, first make it easy (warning, this may be hard), then make the easy change.

Kent Beck (see also Adam Tal)

How to enable empowered, autonomous teams by prioritising ways of working

2024-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

When we were rebooting MOJ’s Cloud Platform team in 2018 as part of our then-new hosting strategy, we had a lot of work to do in a short period: build a new platform, retrain the team on a new technology stack, and prove the value of a new approach to operating infrastructure in MOJ, all while operating (and, ideally, migrating from) the team’s current infrastructure. With all of these competing priorities, we wanted to be intentional in how the team worked, and what they worked on, in these formative months.

How a team works together, and what types of work they do, is incredibly important to help them succeed, so in this post I’ll describe the steps we took to prioritise specific ways of working for the team, how we got the team to buy in to that, and how this helped the MOJ Cloud Platform team to successfully reinvent itself and build a platform that, six years later, hosts hundreds of government services and has saved millions of pounds a year.

How did we do it?

The first step was organising a workshop to identify two things:

What types of work (not specific features or tasks) we should focus on for the next 3-6 months
What we should avoid working on in that time (even—especially—if we care about it or it’s interesting)

The workshop was two hours long. In order to make sure that the whole team bought in to how we were prioritising, we had about eight people in it: all of the senior members of the MOJ Cloud Platform team (product manager, delivery manager, technical architect, and the three senior engineers), the team’s product coach (this was their first foray into product-centric development), and the head of hosting (me).

The group weren’t asked to prepare anything, but were told what we’d be discussing, and to think about how they thought we should work, and what sorts of work to prioritise.

The workshop was then structured like this:

30 minutes collating ideas of things we would like to consider, with no judgement of if they’re things to optimise for, avoid, or something else.
45 minutes identifying duplicates, ensuring shared understanding of all the ideas, and identifying those that are about prioritisation and those that weren’t
45 minutes identifying what to optimise for and what to actively avoid optimising for

All of this work was done on a whiteboard in the room, but we’ve since re-run it remotely, both live and asynchronously in shared documents.

Because this workshop was about how to do the work, not the specifics of what we were building, we made a point of quickly noting and moving on from any conversations that arose around specifics of what we might build. All of these details, like which infrastructure as code tool we would use, or how users would describe their services, were important but could be worked out by understanding our users and their systems.

The important thing was that the group worked together to come up with as broad a list of ideas for how we wanted to work, generated a shared understanding of those ideas, and identified, together, which few of a long list we would use to prioritise our work.

The output

After the workshop, I documented what we’d agreed, adding descriptions for each item both to ensure we still agreed with the ideas and to allow others who hadn’t been in the meeting to understand what our headlines meant. This document was then shared with everyone in the team so that we all understood what sorts of work we would prioritise.

You can read the complete prioritisation document. It comprises three sections:

Our priorities: An ordered list of the five types of things we were going to optimise our work to deliver, in order of preference.
Our principles: The group of ideas that we valued, but were day-to-day things we expected the team to embed in all their work, regardless of the team’s current focus.
Things we value, but won’t optimise for right now: These are things that either might happen as a natural consequence of our work, but we’re not going to organise our work to force them, or are things we’d like to do but aren’t important yet (either because the platform was too young, or the rest of the organisation wasn’t ready)

These three things allowed us to focus the team on only doing the sorts of work they needed to do to meet our initial objectives, do so fast, and with everyone able to understand why a particular type of work is being prioritised (or why not!).

Our top priority was regularly shipping value to our users

In the workshop, it became clear that our top priority should be to regularly ship value to our users.

Before the reboot, the team had spent a number of years working on various ultimately-unreleased attempts at “solving” infrastructure. Each of these previous iterations spent so much time being polished and updated to meet users’ needs before being officially launched that the users had moved on and got more needs. With the rebooted Cloud Platform, we decided that the most important thing was to start small, with something that added value and could be shipped quickly, then iterate to bring more and more users needs into the fold.

Shipping value to users regularly is, to this day, the team’s highest priority, to the point that the team make changes to the production platform dozens of times a day, and the platform itself changes thousands of times a day, all to make sure tenants are getting the value they need.

Learning simultaneously was something we valued, but decided not to optimise for

An example of something we decided not to optimise for was making sure that the whole team learned every new thing at the same pace.

We cared very much about the team having opportunities to learn and grow, but we decided not to optimise for everyone learning about everything from day one. Instead, we relied on the fact that we were prioritising good software development practices (notably, code reviews and pairing) to ensure that everyone was able to learn the technologies we were using over time.

As the team became more mature, we added both 10% learning time and “fire breaks”: every fourth sprint was dedicated to priorities set by the engineers on the team, often investigating potentially-useful technologies for the future.

This workshop set the team up for years of success

It’s now six years since I ran the Cloud Platform’s first prioritisation workshop. In that time, the team has built and grown a hosting platform that’s now the default choice to host all new systems being built in the MOJ. It hosts nearly 500 services, allowing those teams to focus on meeting their users’ needs, is developed entirely in the open, allowing others to learn from and reuse our work, and allows MOJ to make dramatically better use of cloud infrastructure than before by offering our teams a platform that can scale up or down to meet their needs without them having to understand how to run their own infrastructure.

Without our early focus on how to prioritise the team’s work, they could have been easily distracted by potential users’ ideal-world features, or by focussing on making the platform more resilient than it needed to be when it hadn’t got any users. Instead, the team set up a world-class hosting platform, went live within six months, and have added an average of seven new services a month since then, saving millions of pounds per year in the process.

How loosely coupled, autonomous teams are improving MOJ’s hosting estate

2024-09-23T00:00:00+00:00

At the Ministry of Justice (MOJ), we have hundreds of different systems. Over the last six years, we’ve saved tens of millions of pounds on hosting them. In order to do that, we had to change our organisation structure. In this post I’ll share how we did that.

Most services had their own unique hosting environment

When we started on this journey six years ago, MOJ had dozens of teams responsible for the infrastructure underlying our services.

Some of these teams were staffed by MOJ employees but the majority of infrastructure for the MOJ was managed by suppliers and related to just one or a few services.

MOJ had to pay each supplier for the hosting and the people to support it. Because each environment was unique, MOJ couldn’t benefit from consolidation or economies of scale.

In addition, very few of MOJ’s services used public cloud hosting. Many systems could only be released every six months, making releases expensive and error prone.

We predicted we could reduce our costs by 60%

In 2017, I pitched to our then-CTO to build a team to manage hosting for the MOJ. We predicted we could reduce MOJ’s overall hosting costs by 60%, all while improving MOJ’s ability to deliver modern, user-centred software at pace.

I described our strategy on the MOJ Digital blog in 2018, a year into the process.

Principles for a strategic team structure

As outlined in that strategy, we had three types of infrastructure:

Retirement infrastructure: we aimed to close these down
Modernisation infrastructure: in the public cloud, but not yet cloud native
Cloud native infrastructure: reproducible, and easily scalable in response to demand

In order to deliver the strategy, we needed teams to work on each of these areas, and there were some key principles:

Each team should be able to work iteratively and independently of the other teams, so that teams using the platforms were able to deliver their work without being blocked by work in other teams. This is similar to how we architect software to be loosely coupled, so that one system can be changed without breaking another.

At this stage we didn’t know how many retirement environments we would need to close down, so we needed to be able to add new work without derailing existing teams. This meant we needed to be able to grow our capacity without affecting other work: adding or combining teams where needed. This is similar to the software design principle of modularity, where we design software such that its components are able to be separated and recombined flexibly.

We also wanted to ensure that each sub-team was solving a whole problem for their users, so they had a clear vision for their area that fed into the wider strategy, and the autonomy to deliver it. This is analogous to how we design systems to take account of the separation of concerns, where each component of the system is autonomously responsible for its area of concern.

In summary, we needed to design a team structure like a well-architected software system, where:

Teams are loosely coupled
Teams are modular
Teams are responsible for an area of concern

We built the Cloud Platform to support new services that needed infrastructure

In order to stem the tide of new services setting up new infrastructure, I re-focused one of our in-house teams on building a new, cloud native hosting platform: the MOJ Cloud Platform. This platform is now the default hosting environment for the MOJ.

This is a mature, evergreen product built to offer an excellent developer experience to the teams responsible for over 400 production systems. The Cloud Platform handles more than 200 million requests a day, and the platform and the systems that run on it are changed more than 5000 times a day.

We built the Modernisation Platform for services that can’t yet be Cloud Native

Many of MOJ’s legacy systems weren’t likely to become cloud native in the near future.

To allow us to support more of these services while improving their ability to be changed and operated, we built the MOJ Modernisation Platform and migrated services onto it. These services now get the benefits of being on the cloud and we can operate their fundamental infrastructure at scale rather than having duplicated teams for each system.

The Modernisation Platform now hosts the majority of MOJ’s largest, most sensitive and complex services, used across the justice system.

We set up an Operations Engineering team to improve shared services

Many shared services like our GitHub organisation or DNS were being looked after by a small number of busy people, and were often reliant on things only they knew, so we couldn’t improve how we used them.

To tackle this, I set up the Operations Engineering team, whose mission is to manage shared services and identify opportunities to improve our developers’ experience by buying, building, or otherwise solving common problems.

We also got involved in governance

We also started supporting MOJ’s spend controls process. Many projects don’t look like they involve hosting but a lot of government work ultimately involves running a website or a piece of software somewhere. We work with those project teams to use our strategic solutions, making sure they’re getting the best value for money and are aligned to our hosting strategy.

By doing this, we have been able to save time and money for many systems, as well as giving them a better outcome than they expected.

We have reduced costs by nearly 50% so far

We’ve already saved tens of millions of pounds by turning off older systems and environments and by making newer systems more efficient by moving them onto our Cloud Platform and Modernisation Platform.

All of our hosting teams improve their systems multiple times a day, and work to improve the experience of the developers who use their systems. Solving hosting issues once, for all of MOJ, means more of us can focus on meeting users’ needs.

There’s still more to do: we’re migrating all of our remaining prison, probation, and legal aid systems to our platforms over the next year. All of our teams can focus on delivering the best experiences for users and we know that the team structure we’ve built allows us to continue to make the most efficient use of public money.

This post originally appeared on the MOJ Digital blog.

BuzzFeed's ultimate brownies, in metric

2019-07-14T00:00:00+00:00

I really like BuzzFeed’s ultimate brownie recipe, but every time I make it, I find myself doing mental gymnastics to convert from American measurements (cups and sticks) to real (metric) measurements. To save myself that difficultly next time, I decided to convert it once and for all, and publish it here.

Ingredients

284g unsalted butter, plus more, softened, for greasing

227g good-quality semisweet or bittersweet chocolate (60-70% cacao), roughly chopped

128g unsweetened Dutch process cocoa powder, divided

1 tablespoon espresso powder

402g granulated sugar

110g dark brown sugar, packed

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

2 teaspoons kosher salt

6 large eggs

128g all-purpose flour

Flaky sea salt, for sprinkling

Directions

Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat to 350°F (180°C/gas mark 4). Grease a 9x13-inch dark metal pan with softened butter, then line with parchment paper, leaving overhang on all sides. Grease the parchment with softened butter.

Combine the chopped chocolate, ⅓ of the cocoa powder (43g), and espresso powder in a heatproof liquid measuring cup or medium bowl and set aside.

Add the butter to a small saucepan over medium heat and cook until the butter just comes to a vigorous simmer, about 5 minutes, swirling the pan occasionally. Immediately pour the hot butter over the chocolate mixture and let sit for 2 minutes. Whisk until the chocolate is completely smooth and melted, then set aside.

Combine the granulated sugar, brown sugar, vanilla extract, salt, and eggs in a large bowl. Beat with an electric hand mixer on high speed until light and fluffy, about 10 minutes. It will be similar to the texture of very thick pancake batter.

With the mixer on, pour in the slightly cooled chocolate and butter mixture and blend until smooth.

Sift in the flour and remaining 85g cocoa powder and use a rubber spatula to gently fold until just combined.

Pour the batter into the prepared baking pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake until lightly puffed on top, about 20 minutes.

Remove the baking pan from the oven using oven mitts or kitchen towels, then lightly drop the pan on a flat surface 1-2 times until the brownies deflate slightly. Sprinkle with flaky sea salt.

Return the pan to the oven and bake until a wooden skewer inserted into the center of the brownies comes out fudgy but the edges look cooked through, about 20 minutes more. The center of the brownies will seem under-baked, but the brownies will continue to set as they cool.

Set the brownies on a cooling rack and cool completely in the pan.

Use the parchment paper to lift the cooled brownies out of the pan. Cut into 24 bars and serve immediately.

Why I use `chruby` instead of RVM or `rbenv`

2018-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

When you’re working with multiple Ruby projects, you often end up needing to run different versions of Ruby. Version managers help make this easier, and there are three well-known choices for Ruby: RVM, rbenv, and chruby.

Here’s why I use chruby.

`chruby` is simpler and easier to understand

chruby is essentially a very small shell script that sets a few environment variables (mostly $PATH) to point at a given install of Ruby. It also has a separate, optional, script to auto-switch ruby versions when changing directories. Both of the scripts are short enough and clear enough that I can read and follow what they’re doing. It doesn’t do anything more than that, itself; you use ruby-install (a completely separate tool) to install versions of Ruby. Or install them by hand. Or whatever.

RVM and rbenv, on the other hand, do things like overriding cd so that it can switch rubies “magically”. They also install shims of commands like gem, ruby, and others that dynamically look up the available Rubies. These sometimes have bugs, or aren’t entirely transparent. RVM does a bunch of this to enable features like Gemsets, but most of that functionality has been surpassed by Bundler. rbenv is a bit better, but the shims still require “rehashing” (updating) whenever you install a new gem that offers executables.

In short: I’ve had weird issues in the past that ended up being down to RVM or rbenv components misbehaving. With chruby, there’s nothing actually there other than a script that tweaks environment variables, so issues are pretty much nonexistent.

What you need to do to use `chruby`

Getting started with chruby is pretty easy and, because it’s designed to be self-contained and loosely coupled, it’s easy to back out if change your mind. Here’s how to install it and set it up with your first Ruby version:

Install chruby and ruby-install. This doesn’t install a version of Ruby, just chruby itself and ruby-install. I do this with a Homebrew Brewfile.

Use ruby-install to install a version of Ruby, then install Bundler for that version of Ruby:

ruby-install ruby-2.5.0
~/.rubies/ruby-2.5.0/bin/gem install bundler

Enable chruby in your shell (like this). This means you can run chruby ruby-2.5.0 or chruby system (for example) to switch to that version of Ruby, wherever you are. Just running chruby will list the available versions (not including “system”).
Set your default Ruby by calling chruby ruby-2.5.0 in your ~/.bash_profile. Without this, you’ll need to manually call chruby every time you want to use something other than the system Ruby.
You can also optionally set up chruby to auto-switch Ruby versions based on the presence of .ruby-version files in folders you cd to by adding it to your ~/.bash_profile, too (like this). With this enabled, you can also set your default Ruby with a ~/.ruby-version instead of running chruby in your shell.

You can see 3 and 5 in my bash profile. I haven’t done step 4 because I have a .ruby-version in my home directory.

`chruby` is a simple tool that does one thing well

Like all good Unix tools, chruby does one thing well and works with other programs to achieve its goal. It doesn’t try to take over, or insert itself between its user and Ruby, it just helps switch between versions of the language.

I hope this helps you get started with chruby. If you want to know more, chruby’s documentation is pretty clear and easy to follow.

Automating Let’s Encrypt certificate renewal on non-standard servers

2017-12-27T00:00:00+00:00

I run an IRC bouncer to allow me to maintain a single, consistent presence on IRC. I wanted to ensure that all my connections to it were encrypted.

Encrypting connections to your servers used to require complicated configuration and buying expensive SSL certificates. Thanks to Let’s Encrypt, encrypting web traffic is much easier, and entirely free!

Unfortunately, my IRC bouncer (ZNC) isn’t one of the servers that certbot (Let’s Encrypt’s official client) supports out of the box or for which there are third-party plugins, so I had to do some work to automate getting, installing, and updating the certificates. Since it involved some effort, I thought it was worth writing it up here.

How `certbot` works with non-standard servers

For a server using the ports certbot needs for renewal (80 or 443) and without a way to serve extra files, you have to stop the server, run certbot in “standalone” mode (where it runs its own web server for the certificate issuing process), put the certificate somewhere your server can find it, and restart the server process. And you have to do this every 60-90 days, because that’s how long Let’s Encrypt certificates are valid for.

The actual auto-renewal itself is pretty clearly documented: configure cron (or some other tool for scheduled tasks) to run certbot renew every night, and it’ll auto-renew any certificates due to expire in less than 30 days.

Automating certificate renewal

The trick is that certbot allows us to configure, in the renewal configuration file, pre-renewal, post-renewal, and certificate-deployment scripts for each domain we’re managing certificates for.

In my case, the pre-renewal script stops the IRC bouncer and the post-renewal script starts it again.

The deploy script has a slightly more complex job: it makes sure the renewed domain is the one it expects, and merges the various parts of the certificate into a single file in the format that my IRC bouncer expects.

Automating SSL certificate renewal with `certbot` is easy

I’m really pleased that I managed to encrypt my ZNC server’s traffic (for free!), and don’t have to worry about updating certificates by hand. Being able to add encryption so easily means that even services with minuscule user bases can benefit from the increased privacy it brings.

All the code for my ZNC setup is open and MIT licensed, so feel free to reuse it. If you have questions or suggestions, open an issue or pull request on GitHub, or let me know on Twitter.

Shared Parental Leave: a dad’s experience

2016-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

I’m spending 6 months this year on shared parental leave looking after my new son. Read about my experience of SPL on the Civil Service blog.

MOJ Digital’s third birthday: 3 years and 24 million lines of code

2015-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

In honour of MOJ Digital’s third birthday, I spent some time this week digging through our GitHub repositories generating some stats about everything we’ve built. I’ve published the code I wrote to generate the stats and written up my findings on the MOJ Digital blog.

Opera Mini for iPhone

2010-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Opera Mini for iPhone was released this morning, and after some discussion on Twitter, I thought it might be useful (if only to Chris) to write up my thoughts. In general, though, I think Aral said it best:

Opera Mini: the Nokia browsing experience, now on iPhone.

Essentially, Opera Mini doesn’t feel at all like an iPhone app. The gestures are all wrong to varying degrees, the interface is jarring and detracts from the pages you’re trying to view, and it’s not fast enough (its main selling point) to justify using it over Safari (particularly given the myriad interface oddities).

Gestures

Scrolling

Let’s start with the most basic interaction we have on iPhone: scrolling. Scrolling on iPhone is fun. iPhone uses inertial scrolling; it employs real-world physics to make scrolling feel like you’re interacting with something physical with weight and friction. People sit and endlessly scroll back and forth through their lists on iPhone because it’s so tactile.

I have to admit, I spent about five minutes simply scrolling around in Opera Mini. Not because it was fun, mind you, but because it felt so badly wrong. In Opera Mini, scrolling doesn’t accelerate or decelerate in the same way as elsewhere on iPhone, or bounce back when you hit a boundary.

But then again, sometimes it doesn’t do that: sometimes, it slides at a constant rate until it stops and then jumps in the opposite direction to your gesture and scrolls a little bit in that direction. Not because it hit a page edge, though (those stop scrolling dead, mostly): these reversals tend to happen just when you think you’ve got the measure of scrolling in Opera.

Then there are the invisible pseudo-boundaries Opera puts into the page: if you’re within a column in the page you’re looking at (the sort that double-tapping in Safari would fill the screen with; more on that later), Opera will put a scroll boundary around that so that flinging the page across hits that boundary and stops or, more likely, scrolls a little further vertically. I suspect these boundaries are what cause the aforementioned changes in direction, come to think of it.

Zooming

So what about the other most common gesture in Safari? Zooming in Opera is a little like scrolling: it feels like a first-cut demo that you’d get if you described how an iPhone does it to someone who had never used one, then had them build their own.

Opera Mini has two levels of zoom: in, or out. In Safari, if I want to zoom in just a little, I can zoom to exactly the level I want. I have full control. In Opera, if I’m zoomed out and pinch in either direction, for any distance, I get zoomed right in. If I’m zoomed in and pinch at all, I get zoomed out fully.

For a time, I thought that double-tap-to-zoom (in both directions) didn’t work in Opera Mini. As it happens, it does but you have to tap in exactly the same spot for both taps, or Opera considers it a scroll instead of a zoom. Unlike Safari, double-tap doesn’t zoom in on the content you tapped to fill the screen’s width, though: it simply zooms you all the way in where you double-tapped.

But that’s OK because you can single-tap to zoom in. Yes, you read that right: single-tap when zoomed out zooms you in. Know the site you’re visiting well enough that you know exactly which link you want to click on as soon as you see it? Well, tough: you have to zoom in and then click the link.

What if I want to focus on a picture that takes up two thirds of the page? I either have to look at it one bit at a time, fully zoomed in, or as a thumbnail when zoomed out.

Also: since when is zooming a browsing operation? If I’m zoomed in, why does pressing ‘Back’ zoom me out? Why can’t I just navigate back to the page prior to the current page?

Text selection

Remember the days when iPhone didn’t have copy and paste (or text selection), and how Apple’s solution seemed to fit into the OS so naturally?

Opera doesn’t. If you try to select text by pressing and holding when zoomed out, you get zoomed in (or maybe scrolled). If you try to select text when zoomed in, a spinning cursors orbits your fingertip for a few seconds and, sometimes, presents you with a popup menu. Unless you’ve lost your internet connection since loading the page, in which case it doesn’t.

Typically, this menu offers simply ‘Select Text’. If you press-and-hold on, or near, an image, the popup menu offers, in addition to text selection, the option of opening or saving the image, as you’d see in native image selection popover dialogs.

So you click on ‘Select Text’, and a serifed bar cursor (rather than iPhone’s native slab bar cursor) is inserted where your finger was. You then have to click at the beginning of the text you wish to select, and drag to the end.

Sounds like iPhone text selection, right? Wrong: you get no insertion-point loupe like you would elsewhere on iPhone, making precise selection impossible. Made a mistake in your selection? You have to deselect (by clicking away from the popover offering to copy, search, etc.) and start again.

Interface & rendering

Opera Mini really seems to have an inferiority complex.

Whenever you’re using it, the interface screams ‘you’re using Opera!’, detracting from the web pages you’re trying to read. For starters: I know I’m using Opera Mini. I clicked on the app icon on my home screen, so I really don’t need to see Opera’s logo for my entire browsing session. Sure, this is subtle and in the title bar, but it’s another un-iPhone-like touch. Worse, this title/branding bar is fixed and never leaves the screen , regardless of where you scroll.

The branding, though, pales in comparison to the ‘look at me!’ colour scheme. If I’m using a web browser, I’m using it to look at web pages. This means browser chrome should be kept to a minimum, fade into the background, and be relatively low-contrast.

It does not mean that you should make the browser chrome black and red stripes around the web page I’m trying to use. Red and black is high-contrast and, thus, attracts the eye to it. If I’m using Opera, this means my eye is drawn away from the sole reason for me using the app.

This, of course, is ignoring the fact that Opera commits the ultimate faux pas: it uses iPhone’s light status bar instead of the black status bar, despite most of the app’s chrome being black. Whilst we’re looking at visual faux pas, the settings interface is awful, using completely custom controls for everything.

All that said, there is one piece of Opera Mini’s interface that is quite nice: the tabs. Where Safari shuffles you off to a full-screen tab switcher, Opera Mini slides a pane up from the bottom of the screen with small snapshots of your tabs stacked on top of one another, with the active tab frontmost. It’s not worlds ahead of Safari’s implementation, granted, but it’s a nice differentiator.

Speed, privacy, and JavaScript

I mentioned at the outset that Opera Mini isn’t fast enough to justify using it over Safari. That’s not to say it’s not faster than Safari in terms of raw page rendering speed. The problem is that the difference in speed isn’t significant enough to justify using it over Safari, particularly when you take into account the cognitive dissonance required to use it on iPhone. Sure, the page renders a second or two faster but, if it takes you an extra half-second to second-guess everything you do, what’s the point?

This speed-boost is achieved by Opera’s servers downloading, rendering, and compressing the requested page into one bundle, then passing that back to the user’s browser. On older phones this was a boon because they were underpowered enough that rendering HTML and CSS was a significant overhead. On iPhone, sufficient processing power makes performance increase from offloaded rendering moot, but the connection-and-compression optimisation can still be a significant benefit over slow EDGE and GPRS connections.

On top of that, there’s the matter of privacy: with all the data going through Opera’s servers, you have to trust Opera. If you’re just checking the news or weather, that’s no big deal. The idea of checking email, or doing mobile online banking, through Opera Mini and, thus, Opera’s cache servers (even if nothing is cached) concerns me.

And then there’s JavaScript. Opera Mini doesn’t support JavaScript. Except where it does, which tend to be the most inconvenient places. Yahoo! Finance News, for example, sports a number of progressively enhanced personalisation features. If you visit the page in Opera Mini, it executes the first-run JavaScript but disables any further JavaScript-enhanced interactions.

It seems that Opera Mini runs JavaScript on the server such that pages are progressively enhanced, then delivers the rendered page to the client. For any progressively enhanced pages that hide the non-JavaScript interactions when they’re not needed (read: most of them), this will mean that Opera Mini users get a broken experience.

On the plus side, at least the JavaScript experience matches with the rest of the Opera Mini for iPhone experience.

`django_fireeagle`

2008-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

Just a brief note to mention that I uploaded my Django Fire Eagle authentication wrapper to Google Code.

It uses (and complements) my Fire Eagle API binding to wrap up the process of authorising your Django application with Fire Eagle into little more than pointing your users at a URL and setting them free.

Sou’westerly

2008-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

Given that I’m sitting [or was, at the time of writing—Ed.] in a large, metal tube at about 35,000ft., and Ben is writing for his blog, I’ve been gripped by the desire to write for mine, too. Miracles, apparently, will never cease.

For the third year running, now, I’m on my way to Austin, Texas for SXSW.

Past

The first year (2006), travelling with Fatty (whom I had met but once before), was an incredible experience. I got to make lots of new friends and, generally, learn a huge amount and have a brilliant time.

Fast-forward a year to 2007 and Fatty and I were joined by Ben, and I got to share a room with the inimitable Faruk. There were lots of complaints, from others, of the conference becoming too big for its own boots, of too many panels with too little content, and so forth; generally, there seemed to be an air of malaise about SXSW.

Socially, for me, it was bigger and better than my first year: I went to more parties, spent time with more people, and generally made more friends than in 2006. It was good.

Present

I fully expect this year to continue that trend given that, at the airport this morning, Ben and I (alas, no Fatty this year) bumped into Stuart Colville before we had even checked in, Paul Duncan over breakfast, Cyril Doussin and Tristan Turpin (who, along with Stuart, are on the same flight as Ben and me) just after breakfast, and Gareth Rushgrove in the departures lounge.

All this, mark you, before we had even left Gatwick Airport.

Granted, this was aided in no small part by the magic of Twitter (and generally being better acquainted with more people in the web scene), but there was also a certain amount of serendipity thrown in for good measure, too.

Near-Future

Compared to the last two years, my aims have ever-so-slightly changed, too. Rather than, as last year, placing the focus on attending sessions and parties, my focus this year will simply be on “am I making the most of this time?”. I intend to be rather mercenary about this, in fact: last year and the year before, there were times when I stayed at a party for fear of not knowing anyone at another. That shan’t happen this year.

Further, I intend to be very much, to use an Neuro-Linguistic Programming phrase, “in the moment”. Also, in a change to normal programming, I shall be drinking alcohol (although hopefully not to the levels of excess seen at d.Construct 07).

The biggest change, though, is that I shall, finally, be attending SXSW music. The past two years, I’ve lusted after that extra week of partying and gigs (and envied Keith horribly when he’s stayed on); this year, I get to partake myself (along with Ben, Alex Lee, and Lindsey Mooney). Not only that but, thanks to contacts in Yahoo! Music UK, I may have wangled access to closed recording sessions for Yahoo! Music with Ben, Alex, and Lindsey.

I’m looking forward to it all more than you can possibly imagine.

Pinpoint

2008-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

For those of you that haven’t seen it already, go look at Fire Eagle. Do it now.

Good, innit?

For those of you that don’t quite get it, the point is that it’s a central location-brokering service. You tell Fire Eagle where you are (or set your devices and web apps to tell it), and other applications can, if you allow them, use that data in fun and interesting ways (think auto-geo-tagging of photos on flickr, or mapping where your friends are, to name the most obvious).

Anyway: Fire Eagle really caught my attention and, thanks to my friendship with the lovely Mr. Coates, I got to play a little with its API before launch. Whilst it’s not quite finished yet (the methods to find users of your application within a given area, within, and to find recent location updates from your users, recent, are not there at the time of writing), the API and, indeed, website are decidedly lovely.

The website is friendly, playful, and takes all the hard edges off of the concept of using a web app whose sole purpose is to serve other applications and widgets. It has non-awful markup and CSS (although there are a few things I might quibble with in a code review). The URLs, though…

Oh, the URLs! Whoever came up with the idea of allowing http://fireeagle.com/my/location/is/Austin%20TX (or, indeed, any other location, but Austin, Texas is particularly apt for me right now) is an evil genius after my own heart.

The API has had as much care and attention as the web interface, though: no method is out of place, everything accepts what you’d expect. What’s more, it uses OAuth for authorising third-party applications to access user data (and Fire Eagle allows you to specify what level of granularity you want to allow per-application), so even that is positively simple given the existence of libraries to deal with OAuth for you.

If it all still seems like too much hard work to implement bindings for the API in your app, that’s been covered, too: there are bindings for Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Perl, and even one for Python written by yours truly.

I intend to spend a sizeable chunk of my time over the next few weeks playing with Fire Eagle, both updating my Python API binding and hacking around with various ideas I’ve had for fun, useful little apps using Fire Eagle data.

Now, where was I?

`HTTPSConnection`

2008-03-06T00:00:00+00:00

So apparently I now write Python.

In a flustered, last-minute, push to get the Fire Eagle Python API binding ready to ship, I had to switch it to use HTTPS (and point to fireeagle.yahooapis.com, natch).

Given that I’m relatively new to Python, it took a moment to realise I had simply to switch from httplib.HTTPConnection to httplib.HTTPSConnection. This would have all been fine, save one issue: apparently, the otherwise wonderful MacPorts doesn’t appear to link OpenSSL in Python by default (which, naturally, is a requirement for HTTPS).

Without OpenSSL linked, trying to use HTTPSConnection (or, one would imagine, any SSL-related task) results in an error akin to AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'ssl'.

To rectify this is, actually, very simple: run sudo port install py25-socket-ssl in the Terminal (assuming you’re using Python 2.5: other versions of Python will require different ports).

Red

2007-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

I’d been talking to John about her for quite a while before Peter finally introduced us. Dressed in close-fitting red, subtly accentuating her curves, she waited patiently outside.

As I approached she perked up, attentive to my presence, a youthful exuberance in her eyes. My hand lightly touching her side, she drew me closer. As I pushed all the right buttons, she progressed from a quiet whimper to an excited, throaty purr.

I still don’t know her name. Her number, though, is 368 of 500.

Perfection

2007-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Antoine de Saint Exupéry, 'Terre des Hommes' (1939)

This sentiment is just as true for markup, style, and behaviour on the web. The trick, though, is to find the optimal balance between the three.

Markup

When building a page, one should assume nothing: mark it up in the most minimal, sparse way possible whilst still maintaining a logical structure.

No classes. No ids. No divs or spans. Just pure, semantically rich HTML elements.

Next, divide the page into major logical divisions using divs with apt ids. Use classes to identify patterns used throughout the page (cf. Microformats). At this stage, one should be adding semantic context as minimally as possible.

Further, this context should be added at the highest level in the DOM that is appropriate, and no higher. For example, an ordered list of blog posts should not feature a class of post on each list item; rather, the list itself should have the class posts.

Remove redundancy in all aspects of the markup. Consider different choices of elements, even if they seem unfit for purpose.

If, at the end of this process, it seems like the document should be easy to style accordingly then there are probably too many styling hooks, in the form of non-semantic classes, ids and elements, in place already. Go back and think about everything once more. Make every element and attribute justify its existence.

By this point all functionality of the page, be it part of an application or straight prose, should be exposed and fully usable.

All of it.

If there’s a single piece of functionality that you feel you can’t provide in raw HTML, you’re doing it wrong.

This doesn’t mean the interaction has to be as rich as it might be, but it should be usable.

Style

As with the markup, styling should be approached by using the most simple approaches possible to achieve the desired look.

The styling shouldn’t obfuscate any functionality: everything should still work as intended.

Avoid adding extra markup at all costs. If it seems that extra markup is necessary to aid styling, consider that the approach being used to acheive the style is the wrong one.

Behaviour

Finally, enhance the behaviour as necessary. As with styling, consider that the desire to add to the DOM (either before or during the life of a script) could be a sign that the solution is not the optimal one. Similarly, if styles must be added before any interaction occurs, separate them using some class high in the DOM tree.

If anything must be added, be they elements, ids, classes, or styles, add them at the latest possible instant and promptly remove them when unneeded. When applying behaviour use, as far as possible, already extant semantics for context.

Further, if the behaviour relies on styling to justify its existence, it may need rethinking.

Throughout all three, one should attempt to focus on the smallest area possible at a time. Break the document into its requisite parts, developing these in isolation from one another and the framework to bind them together.

Above all: if you’re not finding it hard, and agonising over it, you’re probably not doing it right.

Tired of this phase

2007-10-08T00:00:00+00:00

Ben has publicly challenged himself to not waste his pre-work mornings by sleeping through multiple alarms.

Whilst I don’t intend to mimic his goal (I already get up at 6:30am thankyouver’much), I have a habit of not doing things (posting here, writing for Web Typography, exercising, and the list goes on) for similar reasons. I bemoan a lack of time, a fear of failure, a lack of knowledge… Anything, in fact, to excuse myself from doing things that might challenge me and require me to put effort into something.

So, to echo Ben’s sentiment:

This week, I’m taking the “don’t be so pathetic” method to not being shit at stuff.

A vote for Ask Us Anything is a vote for awesome

2007-08-20T00:00:00+00:00

It would appear that the SXSW08 panel picker is live. James, Norm! and I are hoping to run an Ask Us Anything session.

Vote for it, you know you want to!

Search, and ye shall fail

2007-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

There’s an accepted solution for channelled searching: offer a textbox input and a submit button, supported by a series of links to each channel of the search. The links will typically have JavaScript layered onto them (in theory, at least) to rewrite the form’s target, so that the user may refine their search before submitting it. This behaviour can be seen on Yahoo! US, Yahoo! UK and Ireland, MSN, and yes, even Google.

It must be the best solution, mustn’t it, if all these sites use similar techniques?

The objective of my affection

If we step back for a moment, to examine the user’s needs, we can see two objectives for the average searcher: find something and [perhaps] make it of this type.

The ‘something’ for which the user is searching is, in their mind, the foremost concern. Everything else is secondary. When searching, a user’s first instinct will almost always be to enter their search terms (and why should it be otherwise?). Everything about a search interface is geared toward this: the keyword input has the most visual weight on the screen – on a typical search index page – and the most prominent position – either near dead-centre or in the head of the page, depending on the type of page.

The accepted solution, happily, cedes to this under all circumstances.

The second objective, then, is the type of results that will satisfy the search. The introduction of this second objective is where user behaviour will begin to deviate: depending on their priorities and personal inclinations, users’ execution of this may take place before, after, or even during the steps to meet the primary objective. Unlike the emphasis placed on the keyword input, the type of results to return should be – and, typically, are – de-emphasised where possible, but be present – and have their presence known – should the user require them (either to confirm their beliefs or to make a change).

Humbled

But the accepted solution only pays lip-service to this more complex interaction: for any user without JavaScript, the only acknowledged paths for them to change the channel in which they are searching is to select it before they begin their search or, assuming that the search engine alters the links based on the latest query, directly after (and before they attempt to manipulate their search further).

By using JavaScript to bludgeon links into selecting from a choice of mutually exclusive channels, the user experience of what should be a simple search form is broken for many users when they attempt to interact with it in a way that seems natural to them. To compound this issue further, the use of links means that screen reader users may never be able to use this functionality, as links within the form will never be announced when they are entering their search terms.

The problem is that whomever has implemented these solutions (or their forebears) had the mindset of ‘HTML is static, JavaScript is dynamic’ – or simply didn’t care enough to question the accepted norm – and so overlooked what was staring them right in the face: HTML already has a perfectly good input device for selecting one and only one item from a collection:

The humble radio-button.

Given a little semantic markup and CSS (with a smattering of JavaScript to add extra styling hooks), it’s entirely possible to style a group of radio-buttons in a more visually apt way to indicate that it is filtering the search input, whilst offering a far more interactive experience to all users of the site, not just those with JavaScript.

So I did.

That’s what you can see in action on the new Yahoo! UK and Ireland TV (along with France, Germany, Italy, and Spain).

Implementation notes

As noted above, the main components of the form are a list of radio-buttons, a textbox, and a submit button. Of particular note is the way the radio-buttons are scripted and styled, and the structure of the radio-button labels relative to the form’s <legend>. Further, implementing the search this way requires that the server-side script be able to handle the new field being passed its way appropriately.

Scripted style

For all users, the core functionality of the radio-buttons is available, with these styled as an inline list for users with CSS enabled. The JavaScript, when enabled, will simply add a class to the root of the list, along with an extra <span> to allow styling of the labels in accordance with the design. When the radio-buttons receive focus the ‘selected’ class is moved to the new selection. This activity takes place on focus, mark you, and not click: click events fire on the originating control which, when navigating with the keyboard, will mean the previously selected radio-button.

A `<legend>` in its own life-time

It was brought to my attention that a form’s <legend> will, by default, be announced before each and every form field by screen readers. To make this as unobtrusive as possible, each radio-button’s <label> is worded such that it makes the most possible sense when preceded by the legend text. In English, for example, the radio-buttons will be announced as ‘Search… the web’, ‘Search… for images’, and so forth (where ‘Search’ is the form’s <legend>).

The radio-buttons’ full text, though, would not make sense in a visual context: they should be presented as tabs titled ‘Web’, ‘Images’, and so on. To achieve this, the visually inappropriate portions of the <label> are wrapped in <span>s and positioned outside the browser’s viewport – along with the form’s legend and the radio-buttons themselves – such that they may still be accessed by screen readers and the like.

Furthermore, because the radio-buttons are still present in the content of the page, keyboard users may navigate the form fully through the keyboard (using arrow keys to move between items radio-buttons in a collection).

Once again, this can all be seen in action on the new Yahoo! UK and Ireland TV (along with France, Germany, Italy, and Spain). [Links added at Mike’s suggestion]

Thanks

I can by no means take full responsibility for the successful implementation of this concept, though: I’d particularly like to thank Norm!, Mike Davies, Alex Lee (our designer), Tim Huegdon, and Ann McMeekin (of the RNIB) for all their help, advice, and patience (particularly when I got things working and made lots of excited noises at them), and this wouldn’t have ever been a reality on Yahoo! TV for Europe if it hadn’t been for the receptive, responsive attitude of the engineers working on Yahoo! Search for Europe.

Grace

2007-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Graceful degradation.

Innocuous little phrase, isn’t it?

If one takes a moment to consider it, however, the idea can be taken to it’s logical conclusion: ‘You (or your browser) are incapable of handling the full experience we want to present, so here’s a cut-down version.’

At its core, the mere concept of ‘graceful degradation’ belies a lack of respect for one’s users and, more critically, a fundamental misunderstanding of the medium in which we work.

The fundamental building block of the web is not JavaScript. Nor is it CSS. If your user experience relies on either of these, rather than features native to HTML, then that user experience is fundamentally flawed for use on the web.

The key is to design user interactions with naught but HTML’s base features in mind, later using CSS and JavaScript to enhance that experience (most likely streamlining it or making it more efficient). Done right, this enhancement can even be done in progressive levels, based on the availability of given features in the browser.

As a community, we coin phrases with nary a thought to deeper connotations these might have. Under scrutiny, the idea of ‘graceful degradation’ simply doesn’t align with user-centric design and development.

Progressive enhancement it is, then.

Unrelenting

2007-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Where did the last six months go?

It doesn’t seem like it was that long ago that I was getting excited in the build-up to Reading, BarCampLondon, and d.Construct ‘06 (all three of which were incredibly fun).

Since then, I’ve managed to get a job at Yahoo! Europe as a web developer, become a regular at Pub Standards, launch a new design for this site (and let it languish, despite my best intentions), and attend a second BarCamp, as well as going to various gigs (to name but a small fraction).

I had thought that I’d experience a quick flurry of activity before things returned to normal. How wrong I was: my definition of normal has been altered to include working with some of the best, brightest, and most influential people I could ever care to work with, having an influence on potentially thousands of people’s browsing experiences, almost 4 hours of commuting every day (most of which is spent on public transport), and a general feeling of awe at everything my life has become in this short period of time.

Everything seems to be happening at an unrelenting pace now: SxSW07 is just around the corner, @media won’t be far behind that, with d.Construct ‘07 sure to follow. BarCamps will probably be plentiful this year, too, and I’m going to try to go to Reading again, as well as (hopefully) taking an Outward Bound ‘adventure’. Because of this I’m making loads of new friends and seeing old ones more often, too.

I’m busy as hell, but I couldn’t be happier.

Five

2007-01-11T00:00:00+00:00

How, exactly, does one write a post that purports to list ‘five things you don’t know about me’?

No matter how it’s written, someone out there will probably already know most–if not all–of the items (hi, Mum!). Should it be written for the person asking the question, in which case it might be a different list to that offered to new friends which, in turn, might be different to that offered to fresh visitors from search engines. Maybe I’m just over-thinking the whole thing.

To make this a little more interesting (for me, at least) I’m going to change the game a little and write in detail about one thing (and one that I often have to explain, at that), along with a shorter list of a further four things.

Non-alcoholic

For seven years or so, I’ve abstained from drinking alcohol.

Yes, you read that correctly: a 24 year-old guy that doesn’t drink. No need to alert the media.

On a friend’s birthday (I believe it was his 18th), all those years ago, I got heinously drunk. A bottle of Bacardi, bottle of Jack Daniels, multiple lagers, and an amount of vodka by 10 o’clock and being unable to recall the rest of the drinks consumed until midnight kind of drunk.

Needless to say, I stumbled back home (which, thankfully, was just around the corner) by about midnight and after attempting to sleep and—being troubled by the fact that my room had, apparently, been relocated to a turntable—decided that being violently sick with my head down the toilet for the next six hours was a smart course of action.

Over the next two days, I came to the conclusion that taking a break from alcohol was a good idea. I never intended this break to last very long–much like anyone with an awful hangover–but I held out for a week or two. The next thing I knew, it was a year later and I was telling this story to new friends at university. 7 years on, and I still don’t drink.

I’m often asked if I miss it, or if I’d consider drinking again. I’ve certainly thought about drinking again, but every time I find myself wondering exactly what I’d gain from it. Who knows: maybe one day I’ll give drinking another try.

…and the rest

I wasn’t always a rabid Apple fan: there was a time that I ridiculed a clamshell-iBook-toting friend for his ‘toy’ computer, with its one-button mouse. It took membership—and ultimately becoming an Admin—at Aqua-Soft to turn me into the Apple-lover I am today.

During this time, I made an iTunes skin for Windows Media Player 9. And then Apple released iTunes for Windows about 2 months later. And then I finally got a Mac of my own. And another. And another (although, technically, that’s a machine owned by Yahoo!).
Climbing is the only sport that I have any interest in. I haven’t done any outdoor climbing yet—much to my chagrin—and have always been tempted to go on an Outward Bound ‘adventure’ but haven’t managed to… yet.
Thanks to my GCSE in Art (or rather, my GCSE Art teacher), I found myself unable to draw, design, or even so much as doodle until I was at university (thanks, in no small part, to design blogs). Even now, I find it hard to do (but I’d like to think that I’m getting better at design).
I adore food and cooking. Flavours and the science of food—and their application—are an eternal source of interest for me. I could happily spend days investigating and experimenting in the kitchen. I doubt I’m particularly talented, but I’d like to think I can at least cook well.

Pass

Rather than passing this on to the usual suspects (who are, incidentally, very suspect—and welcome to take this as passing to them, if they like), I thought I’d try to pass this on to a different bunch:

Happy New

2007-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Since the day it was launched, nascentguruism was forsaken. When I started designing it, I had a limited understanding of design and so faced a massive learning curve. Because of this, most of my efforts went into working out how to translate the concepts and feelings I wanted to convey into a working site, along with understanding how to achieve what I wanted in the tools I was using (Photoshop).

In hindsight, it’s entirely logical that the first version of nascentguruism’s design would turn out to be everything I made it and nothing I wanted it to be: I was learning about design by observing and experimenting, and so would quickly lose focus on the overall design, becoming preoccupied with whatever details I wanted to introduce at that moment in time.

After ten months’ toil, the site launched with a whimper and, because of the shoehorning that had taken place to include all the extra details, I quickly became jaded: the format of the site didn’t appeal to me, and so I was unwilling to write. As time passed, my interest waned.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Shortly after SxSW in March–around June, if memory serves–I was inspired to play with some ideas for a redesign of nascentguruism.

Rather than pressuring myself to continue working solidly until it was ready to launch–as I had with the initial ten-month design–I decided simply to get all my ideas down ~~on paper~~ into a PSD before taking time to mull over what I’d come up with. After a while, I’d start anew, creating a design from scratch, building upon–or, in some cases, replacing–what I’d done in the last iteration.

This process continued until mid-October, when I finally felt that the design could go no further without transitioning to markup. Throughout, I refused to do any work–design or markup– unless I was compelled to do so.

I think this relaxed approach to the design and implementation has served me twofold: the design and implementation was less forced, and so the final site has a more relaxed, open feel to it, and this design is something I positively want to work with, to the point that I’m practically itching to post new content to it (and have been for the last month). Further, the iterative, throwaway-prototype approach to designing allowed me to incorporate new ideas effectively, without compromising the design as much as I might before.

Typography

One of my primary focuses in this new design was to experiment with typography, using some of the ideas gleaned from reading Robert Bringhurst’s ‘The Elements of Typographic Style’ and working with Rich on Web Typography. I’ve tried to blend more widely used ideas (like working with vertical rhythm using baselines) and more playful ones (like ornamented indentation), and will continue to experiment and integrate ideas put forth in Web Typography.

Some of these experiments are very reliant on using modern CSS techniques, such as generated content and pseudo-elements and, as such, may not display as expected on all browsers (Internet Explorer, I’m looking at you). Further, most of the font-size-related typography has been optimised for WebKit-based browsers on Mac OS X and, as such, there may be sizing issues with other platforms or browsers. Or maybe not. Everything should be usable, at the very least.

Style

As it stands, the CSS is very clearly showing signs of the hap-hazard approach I took to developing it; in the very near future, I plan to rework it–possibly using YUI reset and fonts.

Support

I couldn’t have achieved everything I have in this redesign if it weren’t for the help of a two notable individuals:

Anton was a constant source of inspiration and has the patience of a monk, answering all my design questions–no matter how inane–with nary a complaint.
Ben put up with my badgering for opinions on this or that markup quandary, and seemed to delight in challenging me to get the ideal markup working in whatever layout I was attempting.

These two deserve more gratitude than I can express here–or in beer form–thank-you both.

There are, however, others that have supported me throughout the process, who also deserve thanks:

Fin?

nascentguruism is far from complete–during this redesign, I’ve come up with many, many ideas for future work on the design and implementation. Most importantly, however, I have a renewed excitement for blogging and a few ideas for future posts in mind.

Only time will tell if it lasts, I suppose.

Just my type

2006-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Last December, Rich Rutter announced The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web (Web Typography, for short), a site that, for me, couldn’t have been more timely: I was just finishing reading the last chapters of Robert Bringhurst’s master-work, The Elements of Typographic Style, the site’s inspiration.

Just as the book itself was beautifully set (as one would expect), well written, entertaining, and generally a joy to behold, the same can be said of Web Typography. From the subtle use of Flash for the logotype to the carefully set table of contents, everything about the site reeks of typographic quality, its own distinct style echoing that of the original Elements.

The purpose of Web Typography, of course, was not to supplant Elements as the definitive resource for typography - “the Typographers’ Bible”, in the words of Herman Zapf - but rather to supplement it: to act as an unofficial companion for those working with type on the web.

It is with much excitement, then, that I’m announcing what will, hopefully, mark the start of a trend: my first contributions to Web Typography, §2.3.1: Set opening paragraphs flush left and §2.3.2: In continuous text, mark all paragraphs after the first with an indent of at least one en, have been published.

I’d like to thank Rich for the opportunity to be involved: he’s been incredibly supportive of my contributions. Like Rich, I’m not a professional typographer (or, in fact, anything more than ‘a guy who has an interest in typography’) but I’d like to hope that, with my contributions, I can help someone out there fall in love with typography and, more specifically, its applications online. If just one person learns to love typography a little more thanks to something I contribute, I’ll be happy.

So, I hope you enjoy what I hope will be the first of many contributions I make to Web Typography!

Camp

2006-08-10T00:00:00+00:00

When I was progressing through education, September was, naturally, a very busy time of year, with new starts and changes to the way my time was squandered: more homework, less homework, more socialising, less socialising, more free time, less free time. Generally, Septembers would set the tone for the rest of the year.

Since entering the real world, these flurries of activity seem to occur far more irregularly but this year is refreshingly different, with September being marked once more by a flurry of activity, much of which is an indicator (hopefully) of how the coming year will shape up.

The back-to-~~school~~cool build-up starts with Reading, over the last weekend of August. Whilst I’ve been to a fair few gigs, I’ve never been to Reading Festival before and I’m getting pretty excited about it now. Granted, some of the acts I’d been hoping to see have pulled out or simply weren’t going this year, but it still looks like there’s a decent line-up.

Then we enter September, and the web-standards conference year kicks off with a quick one-two punch of BarCamp London and d.Construct 2006. d.Construct 2005 was my first web-standards conference and, if last year - along with the line-up for this year

is anything to go by, this year should be stellar.

What is BarCampLondon? Think of it as a way to get the tech/geek community together in London at the end of the summer. What will happen during the event? Only one thing is certain: It’s up to you to decide. The most important thing you should take away from the event? Relationships with other geeks!

This openness permeates every facet of the ‘conference’: rather than a formal gathering at a conference venue, with all the attendees staying in the local swanky hotel at great expense, BarCampers are expected to bring a sleeping bag and pillow, and all find somewhere to camp at the venue. This, to me, is incredible: I’ve often said (although obviously not on nascentguruism, what with not posting much) that the biggest reason for attending any conference is the social aspect.

Add to that the idea that first-timers are expected to contribute (usually by way of presenting something or leading a discussion), and things really start getting exciting. This entirely demolishes the established ‘get an industry figurehead to talk from a pedestal’ approach: everyone is equal, and everyone has something to contribute.

And so I’ve landed my first public speaking gig.

Where was I?

2006-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently, Elly tagged me with this ‘where was I?’ meme, so I suppose I ought to follow it up:

Where was I… one year ago?

This time last year, I was working with Ben at Fujitsu Siemens Computers. As Ben noted, we would have been working on a Microsoft-SharePoint-based document management system. Unfortunately for Ben and I (and our other team-mate, Steve Hayter, who appears to have fallen off the face of the earth), we had short deadlines and large workloads.

As such, we were working long hours on hard problems, pushing one another to our mental limits. I recall one week in particular that I worked something in the region of seventy hours in five days. As one could imagine, trying to push my friends to work this way was a double edged sword: I wanted the work to be done, but I also didn’t want to have to make Ben and Steve do the stupid hours it would require.

Where was I… five years ago? (or ‘How to make Steve feel old’)

It took me a while to work this one out, but it seems that five years ago I would have been coming to the end of my first year at university. I’d met a bunch of people I now feel privileged enough to call my closest friends, spent lots of time avoiding work, and generally doing what university students do (well, other than the getting dangerously drunk part).

Where was I… ten years ago? (or ‘How to make Steve feel really old’)

I was coming up to the ripe old age of fourteen and would have been in year nine at Mill Chase Community School, four months from starting my GCSEs. I wasn’t big but, for my age, I might have been clever.

Who am I tagging?

Jon
Paul
That’s it: I’m lazy.

Mac OS X Keyboard Layouts on Windows

2006-03-19T00:00:00+00:00

A while back, Ben was trying to replicate certain keyboard niceties from the wonderful Mac OS X in Windows. As a fellow ~~superhero with an alter ego~~Mac user by night, Windows user by day and utter pedant, I was intrigued, so decided to dig further into the problem.

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator

The Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator seems the most obvious option to start with: it allows re-mapping of all of the standard keys on a keyboard (all the way across to the return key), along with the use of any of the Windows modifiers (Ctrl, Shift, and AltGr - which is the same as pressing Ctrl and Alt together; apparently Alt isn’t considered a “Shift state” by the Keyboard Layout Creator)

It’s easy enough to get most of the way to Mac OS X keyboard goodness: one can assign whatever characters to keys as one sees fit, assign values for the aforementioned modifiers, and generally make some pretty cool changes to your keyboard layout. This lets us get most of the way towards the dream of proper, nice OS X typography on Windows: you can rearrange the standard keyboard, set up AltGr to behave like the Mac’s Opt with lots of keys, and generally get most of the real niceness in OS X done, and using native Windows functionality.

Warning: the following will almost certainly make the characters shown on your keyboard not match those they produce in Windows (unless you use Windows through Virtual PC on Mac OS X, in which case they will match more). If you have to look at the keys to remember which is which, using this is not advised. I cannot be held responsible for you breaking/being unable to use your computer if you use this.

To save everyone the time and effort, however, I’ve already made a keyboard layout for Windows. To install the new layout, simply unzip the file and run the contained MacOSUK.msi. To then set the layout up for use, go to Control Panel>Regional and Language Options>Languages, click Details…, then click Add…, and set ‘Input Language’ to ‘English (United Kingdom)’ and ‘Keyboard layout/IME’ to ‘United Kingdom (Mac OS X)’. Click Ok, and then Apply.

With this, the Windows language bar should appear on your task bar. You can then switch between United Kingdom (Mac OS X) keyboard and whatever other keyboard layout you so choose. Alternatively, you could remove other keyboard layouts in the ‘Text Service and Input Languages’ (the one where you added the new layout), making the new Mac OS X style layout your default (and hiding the language bar).

Accent chords

The one thing that this doesn’t cover, though, is the neat little tricks you can do in Mac OS X to create characters like ñ: hold Opt and press n followed by n on its own, along with various others of a similar ilk.

Here is where AutoHotKey, that Ben mentioned, comes in: you can specify character replacement strings which are identified as you type (think auto-correct for letters). The observant members of the audience will already be thinking to themselves ‘but didn’t you just link to a homebrew keyboard layout to make our Windows keyboards just like those on the Mac, save a few keys?’

Why yes I did Billy, yes I did.

With a combination of AutoHotKey and our Mac-esque keyboard layout, we can have almost identical input on Mac and Windows, save the need, on Windows, to use AltGr in lieu of the Mac’s Opt.

Once again, because I’ve more time on my hands than is necessarily healthy, I’ve already made an AutoHotKey script for most of the easier accent chords. Notably absent are grave chords (due to what appears to be a bug in AutoHotKey’s Unicode handling, I felt compelled to leave them commented out) and all those chords that create characters with no extended-ASCII value.

To use it, install and run AutoHotKey, right-click the system tray icon and select ‘Edit This Script’. Copy and paste the contents of my script into this script (either overwrite or append it), save, and select ‘Reload This Script’ from the menu of AutoHotKey’s system tray icon.

That’s all, folks!

By this point, you should have Mac OS X style text input on your humble Windows computer. The only thing that’s missing now is switching the modifier keys so that they’re all laid out like the Mac but, thus far, I’ve not found any program that successfully achieves that. I’ll let you know when I do.

Suckswee

2006-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently it’s nearly time for Fatty and me to make our way to SXSWi ‘06. Tomorrow (Wednesday) morning, we’ll be leaving my house at some ungodly hour and heading to Gatwick, to fly with Continental to Austin, via Houston.

As Fatty mentioned, we’ll probably be spending some of the flight working out how we’re going to spend our time in Austin. Thanks to the wonders of SiteSucker, I have details for all the goings-on throughout the week direct from the SXSW site and loaded onto my iBook. The only certainty at this point is that we plan on spending Monday night fiddling with some shiny balls with the likes of The Molly (who is our team’s official cheerleader, apparently), Faruk (our team captain), Da Keith (a team-mate), and many, many more.

If you’re going to be at Suckswee, take a look at my about page, remember my face, and either try to avoid me like the plague (which I’d heartily recommend, if you value your sanity) or grab me and say ‘hi’.

I’d prefer the latter.

Four Things

2006-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

Apparently, Ben’s poked another meme in my direction. Without further ado, here are my lists:

Four jobs I’ve had in my life

Petrol-station assistant
Checkout supervisor
Technology analyst
Information systems developer

Four movies I can watch over and over

Lethal Weapon
The Wedding Singer
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back
High Fidelity

Four TV shows I love to watch

Family Guy
QI
Numb3rs
X-Men: Evolution

Four places I have lived

Bordon
Um… Yeah…

Four places I have been on holiday

Orlando, Florida, USA
Paris, France
Spain
Nottingham

Four of my favourite dishes

Carpaccio
Bacon, sausage, and egg sarnie
Whole packs of ‘speciality’ meats (Parma ham,
Anything with seafood (and mussels in particular)

Four websites I visit daily

Gmail
Ctrl+Alt+Del
Sinfest
This very site, in the hopes that the Magic Blog-Post Færies will have added content in my ~~laziness~~absence

Four places I would rather be right now

Universal Studios: Islands of Adventure
Paris
Two feet to my right and three feet back, playing on my Xbox 360 whilst sat on my bed.
With The Girlfriend

Four bloggers I am tagging

Carson Workshops Summit

2005-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

Another month, another conference booking. This time, ~~The Boy Wonder~~Ben and I will be attending the Carson Workshops Summit on the 8th of February, 2006, with ~~The Joker~~Fatty in tow.

Rumour has it that Jeremy, Andy, Richard, and The Jon will be there, not to mention the speakers: Mister Mint, a Signal, and someone predictable, to name but a few.

Add to that the fact that it’s Ben’s birthday the day after, and it should make for an altogether good day/evening.

XAML: An insider's look out

2005-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

Zach recently posted his thoughts on Microsoft’s XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language). As my main development environment is Microsoft’s .Net Framework, I’ve had a chance to have a more in-depth look at what XAML is and does, and feel that I should clear some points up.

Disclaimer: I have no knowledge of Microsoft’s true plans for XAML. These are simply my observations based on what I’ve read and seen on the Internet, and cursory fiddlings with XAML as part of the WinFX pre-release SDK

What is this XAML you speak of?

XAML is Microsoft’s new application markup language (as noted in the name ‘eXtensible Application Markup Language’).

This, then, automatically implies that its primary focus is applications or, more specifically, client-side applications. These could be the likes of Microsoft Word, or they could be something that runs on the client, but is hosted in a browser environment (read: Flash applications).

The raison d’être of XAML, rather than being to replace HTML, is (or rather, would appear to be) to allow client-side application developers to seperate their user interface ‘code’ from their functional code.

Why all the hubbub?

Web developers know that having a hulking great piece of ~~JavaScript~~ECMAScript to build their entire user interface isn’t good for code maintenance. Why should the same not be true for client-side applications? After all, you don’t hear anyone crying “think of the children!” when people talk about XUL which is, ultimately, a different implementation of the same concept.

Personally, I think most of the noise is because Microsoft is making (and, in fact, has to make) noise about the benefits of XAML over the old-school way of doing things. Your average in-house developer, closed off from the outside world, that only uses computers for their day job will probably only care about what comes from the hand of God. Add to that the fact that Microsoft has to get the message out to what probably amounts to millions of developers, and they need to make a lot of noise.

Compare this again to XUL: it’s not the default framework for the most used operating system in the world; it has a handful of ‘big’ adopters (who are, in terms of user base, significantly smaller than that of Windows) and a (relatively) small, vocal developer-base.

The point, however, is that XUL and XAML have very similar goals in mind: seperation of interface structure and presentation from ‘logic’.

Implementation

As a very strong advocate of semantic, accessible web development, the implementation details of XAML grate against my nerves slightly, but not as much as you might think.

Usability

Look at the CD Catalogue, that’s less usable friendly than what Amazon is. That makes me wonder if the web is turning too looks specific. Soon the content will be forgotten and it’ll only be about looks. With that, it looks as though its taking the focus of what the web’s built for (‘To house globally accessible documents’).

I’m not sure Zach’s comparison of the CD Catalogue tech demo with Amazon is a fair one; a better one would be to something like CoverFlow with Amazon integration. It’s also worth bearing in mind that this is a tech demo we’re talking about, not a final product.

Further, I would reiterate the point that XAML is for applications, not documents.

Semantics

Zach also laments the lack of semantics within XAML, referencing setting an attribute value (Value="verticalgradient LimeGreen Green"), rather than some seperate, more semantic notation (he seperates the three values into their own attributes).

This is one point I’d tend to agree with Zach on and, in fact, take one step further: if Microsoft really want to seperate things, allow seperation of structure from presentation, too. As I noted earlier, I’ve a strong feeling that this is already possible, to some degree but, if it is, it’s almost certainly not enforced in any way (like, say, a completely different markup tailored for each, with some form of referencing).

Platform specificity

Every year more people are switching to a Mac for various reasons(I’m not going to get into a debate here), what about them? Will Mac retaliate and do their own version thus leaving Windows users in the dark on some of the web pages. Will their [sic] be a port? Will it get taken back by Microsoft in the hope to fish some Mac users over?

Looking at the direction Microsoft appear to be taking with their Sparkle Interactive Designer (as a tool to create rich applications on Windows and the web), you can almost taste the ‘we want a piece of Flash’ sentiment. Add to that the fact that Microsoft explicitly state that the output from Sparkle will work cross platform and device (in their Expression family tour). I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if we see:

A gradual uptake (mostly by Microsoft shops and geeks, initially) of Sparkle in addition to Flash (or, perhaps, instead of, for some geeks).
A cross-platform .Net runtime environment that is, in some way, endorsed by Microsoft. This might be in the form of support for Mono or the like, some extension of the current shared source initiative, a fully-fledged, Microsoft-built .Net runtime for the Mac and *nix, or something in between.

Final thoughts

This is something I’ve actually been mulling over for quite a while and, much as I don’t like the approach Microsoft are taking in terms of the actual markup, I can see XAML making my life (and the lives of those I work with) far, far easier when we have to manage future application interfaces.

It is far from the panacea Microsoft are suggesting that it is, but it is still far superior to the current code-soup approach in most Windows applications.

What's in your folder of shame?

2005-11-08T00:00:00+00:00

I just noticed Jeff Veen’s post about his “folder of shame” (via Ben, surprise, surprise) and, much as I’m still very new to this here blogging malarky, I too have a folder of shame. Currently, it contains:

Why I love my Macs
What I want to play with or fix on my site
Mac OS keyboard layouts on windows
A post commenting on Microsoft’s Atlas

As I’m still pretty new to the game, my folder actually seems to contain things I’m seriously working on, but haven’t yet finished. This, though, is mostly because I’m still very much trying to find my feet in the world and get the hang of writing things for ~~my mum~~the world to see.

The musical baton

2005-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

Back when I was still known as Stevie ‘no blog’ Marshall, Ben passed me the musical baton. Well, I’ve finally decided to pick it up and run the final stretch.

As Ben noted, all those months ago, the baton is something akin to a chain-letter but, via the medium of blogging, seems rather pleasant, as opposed to the innumerable forwarded e-mail quizzes that garner instant deletion. I also think it would be rather intriguing to have some kind of auto-generated map of who passed this to whom. Granted, that would be hard to manage when Johnny-come-latelys like myself are involved, but it would be interesting, all the same.

As I’m so late to the party, I’ve decided to take a little more time and care over this, with a little more detail and information.

Anyway, here’s the meat:

Total volume of music on my computer

I currently have 38.95GB of music on my PowerMac, which I manually copy to my iBook whenever the whim takes me. If iTunes is to be believed, that’s about 20.2 days’ worth of non-stop ~~noise~~music. That’s mostly made up of 192kbps-encoded mp3s, with the occasional non-conformist track from other sources.

That’s enough that I can’t quite fit it all on my 40GB fourth-generation iPod (black and white screen with click-wheel); this is a source of much discomfort.

The last CD(s) I bought

I’ve actually not bought any music within the last fortnight or so, which is incredibly uncommon for me.

The last CDs I bought, though, were Fighting With Wire’s ‘Cut The Transmission’ EP and their ‘Machine Parts’ single, when I saw them live at the Wedgewood Rooms on the 10th of October.

As I was able to buy both of those for a handful of change, though, I feel compelled to include my next-most-recent full-price purchase: Jimmy Chamberlin Complex’s ‘Life Begins Again’.

Fighting With Wire

The two Fighting With Wire CDs comprise 6 tracks, which sound somewhat akin to a combination of Foo Fighters and another, more metal-y band I can’t quite remember the name of.

Considering I hadn’t even heard of Reuben, the act that they were supporting when I saw them, until the day before the gig, I’m very impressed to have come across such a promising group. I was also suitably impressed by The Mascara Story, but their CDs had sold out by the time I went to get one.

Jimmy Chamberlin Complex - ‘Life Begins Again’

The Jimmy Chamberlin Complex album is an altogether different beast: the debut album of Jimmy Chamberlin, the former Smashing Pumpkins and Zwan drummer, was something for which I had very high expectations.

As a huge Pumpkins and Zwan fan, I had many preconceived ideas about what a Jimmy Chamberlin album might be like. This album broke all of my preconceptions, and it broke them beautifully. Whilst the album has echoes of his contributions to the Pumpkins (and highlights his input on their style or, perhaps, the effect his time with them had on his style), it is very much distinct from their works.

A word of warning, however: this album is a little more prog-rock than that of the Pumpkins - it focuses heavily on Jimmy’s work on the drums (obviously), and is very instrumental. If you need something to sing along to, this isn’t necessarily the best choice (or give this a try and see if it changes your perceptions and tastes; either way is good).

All that said, I love this album.

The song I’m playing right now

Portishead’s ‘Sour Times’ has just started playing. I was introduced to Portishead a few months ago when a friend sent me their debut album, ‘Dummy’, as a gift for no apparent reason (not that I’m complaining - any CD I don’t have to buy is fine by me).

Whilst I didn’t actually choose to play this song (iTunes party shuffle, how I love thee!), it’s a bloody good choice, all the same: haunting, melancholy, ethereal, and, at the same time, soothing and refreshing.

FiveSixSeven songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

Writing this list is incredibly difficult for me. As with most people who are passionate about music, pinning myself down to a handful of songs that I would find it hard to be without usually results in a list that’s longer than my actual music collection. ~~Also, this list will probably change to some degree if you were to ask me the same thing next week, or in a year’s time, so don’t hold me to it.~~ Make that ‘this list will change within a minute of me posting it’.

That said, here goes (in no particular order):

‘I Heard It Through The Grapevine’ by Marvin Gaye, from ‘Motown Heartbreakers’

Whilst this may not, technically, be Marvin Gaye’s best song, it was Motown’s biggest selling record. More importantly for me, however, this song reminds me very much of my childhood - it epitomises my mum’s (somewhat limited) taste in music, and makes me think of long journeys as a child to visit my grandparents.

It’s also of note that I have this song on three different albums: ‘Motown Heartbreakers’, ‘Motown Chartbusters: Volume 3’, and ‘The Very Best Of Marvin Gaye’. I chose to mention ‘Motown Heartbreakers’ specifically because that is the album I would have listened to as a child: the others are far more recent acquisitions.

‘Show Me How To Live’ by Audioslave, from ‘Audioslave’

I simply cannot get enough of this song (or, in fact, the rest of the album). I spent about 15 minutes just trying to decide which track from the album to list. Audioslave’s music is hard-as-nails, but intricately crafted and with awesome vocals from Chris Cornell. I listen to this album at least once a week and, without fail, I end up ~~screaming~~singing along.

‘Whenever, Wherever, Whatever’ by Maxwell, from ‘MTV Unplugged’

Maxwell is one of those artists that I think doesn’t get anywhere near the respect he deserves. He has one of the richest, most satisfying voices I’ve ever heard. His songs are romantic without being trite, intellectual without sacrificing accessibility, and, above all, just damn good. Not only does this song define the way I feel about the people I care about, it exudes an intimacy and tenderness rarely found in other songs (especially so in the live version I’m referring to, but the same holds for the original studio version).

‘Baby Let’s Rock!’ by Zwan, from ‘Mary Star Of The Sea’

This is another track where I could substitute it for any other from the album. Beautifully crafted, sweet with just enough rockiness, the whole album rarely has time to finish before I’m playing it again.

Zwan’s work is an altogether different beast from that of The Smashing Pumpkins, the band from which half their members originated, but just as good.

Speaking of Pumpkins…

‘Silverfuck (Live In London) / Over The Rainbow’ by The Smashing Pumpkins, from ‘Earphoria’

What can I say about a thirteen-and-a-half minute rendition of ‘Silverfuck’ that has a rendition of ‘Over The Rainbow’ in the middle, for good measure?

Fuck me, it’s good!

That’ll do just fine. When I got ‘Earphoria’, I already had most of the Pumpkins’ back-catalogue, so my expectations were high. ‘Earphoria’ delivers, and then some, until you get to ‘Silverfuck’, whereupon you spend the next thirteen-and-a-half minutes thinking “holy shit, this is the most insane thing I’ve heard in years”. Or maybe that’s just me.

‘Brighter Hell’ by The Watchmen, from ‘Silent Radar’

Another beautiful, intricate, sensual song. The story goes that, to make their ‘Silent Radar’ album, The Watchmen spared no expense, to the point that they used a $10,000 vocal microphone! That may sound excessive but, if ‘Brighter Hell’ is anything to go by, it was more than worth it. (And yes, I realise that money doesn’t equal talent, but money plus talent can often make wonderul things.)

‘No One’s Gonna Hurt You’ by James Iha, from ‘Let It Come Down’

Yet another soft one, again from a former Pumpkin. I’d explain why this one means a lot to me, but the person it’s for knows who they are and why it does, so that’s all that matters. Just trust me that it’s a beautiful song, and, as with Jimmy Chamberlin, you can see Iha’s influence on the Pumpkins, and how they influenced his work.

I could continue this list for hours, but I think it’s for the best if I leave it at that.

‘Brighter Hell’ was added to the list minutes after I originally posted it, for anyone that cares about such things.

So was ‘No One’s Gonna Hurt You’ (although significantly after the fact)…

Passing it on

As the rest of the Internet (or as near as damnit) has already had the baton, I think there’s little point in me trying to pass it off to anyone, so I won’t bother. If you feel like prising it from my hands by all means do, but leave a note in the comments so I can add a link to you as someone I ‘passed’ the baton to.

All booked up for SXSWi

2005-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

So that’s it - Fatty and I are all booked up for our sojourn to the veritable geek-fest that is SXSW interactive (which I am hereby christening ‘suckswee’).

We’ll be be arriving in Austin at about 4pm local time on the 8th of March 2006, having left Blighty (that’s Britain for those of you that didn’t know) at 9:30am on the same day.

We ended up getting a room together in the Radisson; I know everyone says that the Hampton Inn Downtown is where all the cool kids stay, but they were all booked out (save rooms with double beds, and I don’t plan on sharing a bed with Fatty anytime soon). This either means that there are going to be far too many truly cool people in Austin next March, or that the Hampton booking system somehow knows when people who it deems uncool are trying to book rooms, and simply lies to them.

I’m hoping it’s the former.

We’ve then got a day or so either end of SXSW to enjoy the sights and sounds around Austin or, better yet, to get more acquainted with our fellow sucksweers, and we leave at about 4pm local time on the 16th.

I can’t wait.

PS: Let me know in the comments if you’re going too and we can meet up or something!

Also, recommendations for where we can go for breakfasts would be good, too, as such things appear to be unheard of in the Austin Radisson…

The inaugural journal entry…

2005-10-19T00:00:00+00:00

Well, it’s finally here!

After 10 long months, countless hours slaving over HTML and CSS, and more procrastinating than even I would have thought possible, nascentguruism is finally a real website!

First and foremost, I’d like to thank Ben for all his help and support. Were it not for his inspiration, assistance, and, frankly, constant whinging that I just needed to get on with my site and get it live, nascentguruism wouldn’t be half the site it is now. Thanks Ben, I owe you, big-style.

So, welcome to nascentguruism, one and all. If you’re interested in who I am or how the site is made, then you probably want the about page.

A word of warning: the site is still very much a work in progress. I’m going to be tweaking and sprucing up pretty much anything I can think of over the coming weeks (well, from a techie perspective, at least - the look of things should remain fairly constant). As such, if you see something that looks a bit odd or that you think needs work, don’t hesitate to let me know, either via the comments here, or via email

Update: One of the first errors I’m going to try to crack is visible on the about page for those of you using either Firefox up to 1.0.* or Safari - if the image isn’t loaded quickly enough, the CSS-positioned corners don’t end up in the right places on the page. Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Also, if anyone uses Opera and has any idea how I can fix the fact that it doesn’t correctly handle absolutely positioned elements with width: auto and left and right positions, then that would be nice.

Steve Marshall

Quotes that inspire me

How to enable empowered, autonomous teams by prioritising ways of working

How did we do it?

The output

Our top priority was regularly shipping value to our users

Learning simultaneously was something we valued, but decided not to optimise for

This workshop set the team up for years of success

How loosely coupled, autonomous teams are improving MOJ’s hosting estate

Most services had their own unique hosting environment

We predicted we could reduce our costs by 60%

Principles for a strategic team structure

We built the Cloud Platform to support new services that needed infrastructure

We built the Modernisation Platform for services that can’t yet be Cloud Native

We set up an Operations Engineering team to improve shared services

We also got involved in governance

We have reduced costs by nearly 50% so far

BuzzFeed's ultimate brownies, in metric

Ingredients

Directions

Why I use `chruby` instead of RVM or `rbenv`

chruby is simpler and easier to understand

What you need to do to use chruby

chruby is a simple tool that does one thing well

Automating Let’s Encrypt certificate renewal on non-standard servers

How certbot works with non-standard servers

Automating certificate renewal

Automating SSL certificate renewal with certbot is easy

Shared Parental Leave: a dad’s experience

MOJ Digital’s third birthday: 3 years and 24 million lines of code

Opera Mini for iPhone

Gestures

Scrolling

Zooming

Text selection

Interface & rendering

Speed, privacy, and JavaScript

`django_fireeagle`

Sou’westerly

Past

Present

Near-Future

Pinpoint

`HTTPSConnection`

Red

Perfection

Markup

Style

Behaviour

Tired of this phase

A vote for Ask Us Anything is a vote for awesome

Search, and ye shall fail

The objective of my affection

Humbled

Implementation notes

Scripted style

A <legend> in its own life-time

Thanks

Grace

Unrelenting

Five

Non-alcoholic

…and the rest

Pass

Happy New

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Typography

Style

Support

Fin?

Just my type

Camp

Where was I?

Where was I… one year ago?

Where was I… five years ago? (or ‘How to make Steve feel old’)

Where was I… ten years ago? (or ‘How to make Steve feel really old’)

Who am I tagging?

Mac OS X Keyboard Layouts on Windows

Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator

Accent chords

`chruby` is simpler and easier to understand

What you need to do to use `chruby`

`chruby` is a simple tool that does one thing well

How `certbot` works with non-standard servers

Automating SSL certificate renewal with `certbot` is easy

A `<legend>` in its own life-time