Recently, a very good friend of mine (@richieclarkie) decided to return to the IT industry after a 15 year absence. Clearly a 15 year hiatus, is significant in any industry, but especially pertaining to IT, it is arguably exceptional. ➡️

Several years ago, we migrated from a Cisco Wi-Fi infrastructure to a UniFi setup. UniFi (from Ubiquiti Networks) offer a pretty remarkable WiFi solution, especially when it comes down to cost. ➡️

During the summer of 2014, we migrated the St Mary’s Shaftesbury MIS (Management Information System) from Schoolbase to iSAMS. Please note, that the reasons for instigating this major system change, and the processes involved (political & technical), are not covered in this blog post. ➡️

Most software developers at some point, will almost certainly encounter the need to hack together a solution. To quote Wikipedia, the term hack, for the purposes of this blog post is: ➡️

A key benefit of working with the web (or more specifically http) is it’s native ability to cache. This can be ‘tuned’ to make websites extremely fast and slick, especially after initial page load. ➡️

Ok…I get the whole CSS pre-processor movement; I don’t need convincing of why it is so good. However, what I do need, is a justification to invest time into learning yet another technology! ➡️

At St Mary’s Shaftesbury, one of the many additional functions we have built, to work alongside our Schoolbase MIS (Management Information System), is the automation of a weekly ‘Rewards and Sanctions’ report. ➡️

I must confess to have slightly struggled with the title of this blog post, as I didn’t wish to be responsible for encouraging unnecessary complaints and animosity between clients and web designers! ➡️

Recently, I had the privileged of being asked to give a ‘show and tell’ style presentation, at the Firefly Developer’s Day, held at Radley College. In truth, I received this invitation with a mixture of pride and anxiety – visions springing to mind of the Michael Bay ‘meltdown’ during his presentation at CES 2014! ➡️

It’s a sad fact that security can all too often be the poor relative in software and systems design (please note that this blog post is not intended to address system security per se; the OWASP website and / or security expert Troy Hunt’s blog, are good references for that topic). ➡️