Latest articles
Integrating OpenAI's GPT in a React Native App
Let’s start with the basics of how to use OpenAI’s GPT language models programmatically from NodeJS.
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Bespoke or off the shelf software?
For some projects, ready-made apps can be a good fit in providing functionality that businesses require. When a customisable and advanced solution is required, bespoke software has several benefits as opposed to using off-the-shelf products.
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Using Host Card Emulation with Adafruit PN532 Reader
This article will go through how to set up host card emulation (HCE) on android to communicate with the Adafruit PN532 NFC shield. This article will go through the code required on the android side and then the code needed to set up the NFC reader.
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Planting trees with Ecologi
We’re conscious about reducing our environmental impact; from the tools we use in development to the simple recycling of the office waste, we aim to do as much as we can. Many of the solutions we build are also helping our clients to digitise workflows that traditionally rely on paper solutions or lots of travel. But we are always looking for ways that we can do more which is why we have recently joined Ecologi.
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Digital transformation
With the recent meteoric rise of Artificial Intelligence through ChatGPT, the global population have had a glimpse into the real long-term potential of technology. But what does digital transformation actually look like when it comes to enhancing your business?
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FIFA+ Stadium Experience: Augmented Reality (AR) for on-site fans
Unfortunately, 2022’s contentious World Cup was yet another major tournament without glory for the Three Lions, delaying the sure inevitability that football is on it’s way home…
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Create a command line to make a user admin in Laravel 9
Being able to create your own command lines can be very useful is certain situations.
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How to start a Zoom Meeting from Rails ?
On a recent project at Azuki, we have been using the Zoom API and we thought that it would be a great idea to share how we did it. In this very simple tutorial, I am going to show you how to automatically create a zoom link automatically whenever you create a meeting (or a reunion, or even a pow-wow).
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Rails for beginners : How to make a 'soft delete' ?
Deleting something from your database is very common and handled very easily by rails as part of a CRUD action. In some cases, it is useful to create a “soft delete”, meaning that the deleted element will still exist in the database but won’t appear to the user. This method is useful if you or a user accidentally delete something and would like to retrieve it.
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Music and programming, why and how are they similar ?
Since I started learning to code, I have encountered the saying “Musicians made good programmers” many times. Without really knowing what to do with this adage, I have moved on from my career as a musician to a full-time programmer during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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How we run our projects at Azuki
We thought it would be helpful run through how we run our projects here at Azuki. We try and keep it lightweight in order to stay agile but also have pretty clear method for successfully delivering our projects.
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How to use heart rate apps to track your fitness
The new year has passed and it’s around this time that we start to lag in our resolutions to maintain better health and fitness. It means that we need a little extra help keeping on our fitness path and one of the best ways in which we can keep track of our fitness this year is by monitoring our heart rate.
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How to Create a Windows Installer for an Electron App using Forge
One of the ways that an Electron app can be packaged for distribution is by using Electron Forge.
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The Difference between Native, Cross-Platform, Hybrid, and Web apps
Navigating the world of app creation is complicated. Developing an app is a tough undertaking, so making good choices about how it’s going to be built is crucial. Here’s a quick overview of the main options for developing a mobile app.
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The Top 5 Benefits of Building a Mobile App for Your Business
Right now, there are over two million apps in the App Store, as people feverishly download anything that will make their lives easier – or more fun. You probably have at least 15 apps on your mobile device, helping with things like ride-sharing, social media, games and entertainment, sleep or water drinking schedules, and the list goes on.
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Creating an Electron Application for the Raspberry Pi
Hi! In this blog post, I’ll be stepping through the basic first steps involved in creating an Electron application on the Raspberry Pi computer. Specifically, I will be using the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+, not the brand new Raspberry Pi 4 which was released a few days ago. Hopefully these instructions would work just as well for the new model, but we haven’t got our hands on one of those to try it out yet.
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Software Impact on Remote Freelancers' Work
Whether it is in the field of accounting, journalism, writing or teaching, freelancers have managed to get hired and at the same time link with the millions of other professionals in their area of expertise.
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How to Hire a Freelance Web Developer – Part 2
In part 1 I covered how to find a freelancer. In this part, I’ll talk a bit about how we run our projects smoothly.
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How to Hire a Freelance Web Developer – Part 1
Contracting work out to a freelance web developer or programmer is a great way to complete technical work without taking on the resources and commitment of hiring a new employee. It also means you can work with an expert who has lots of relevant experience and expertise, and who would be hard to recruit and expensive to retain.
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Getting Going with the Apple Watch in Rubymotion
We’ve been putting an Apple Watch extension to an existing app and it’s been great fun! We were hitting some issues getting going with it in Rubymotion. I thought I’d start to document our findings and hopefully that’ll help others.
Read moreRails Performance
Here’s an interview with DHH (creator of Ruby on Rails) where he talks about how Rails can compete with other technologies in terms of performance amd how they’ve made Basecamp fast.
Read moreKeeping track of attribute changes over time in Ruby
For a recent project, we wanted to send a daily email with the recent changes to certain records. It was wanted by email so that they had an email trail of all changes of interest. It could have been a full blown web based thing but this gave us the opportunity to keep it simple.
Read morePicking images & videos from the iOS photo album with RubyMotion
We’ve been working on a video app for a client of ours. We came across the need to select videos from the iOS camera roll/photo album. It was one of those trial and error type (-frustrating) endeavours. We thought we’d write down our findings in the hope of saving someone else from the same frustration.
Getting going with ActiveJob on Heroku
ActiveJob was introduced into Rails 4 to handle slower tasks that don’t want to hold up the web server. This functionality is available in older Rails versions although through non-core gems. I wanted to write up a quick guide to getting it running with Sidekiq on Heroku.
Using Postgres' hstore in Rails 4 with scopes
Hstore has been around for a while now but its Rails support has become impressive since Rails 4. In addition to that, it’s now supported on Heroku Postgres.
Pretty address from coordinates in iOS using RubyMotion
For a recent project, I needed to generate a nice address from lat/long coordinates. I’ve done this many times on web-based applications. It turns out it’s even easier in iOS.
Read moreProfiling JSON request in Rails using Rack Mini Profiler
I often use the rack-mini-profiler gem while developing my Rails applications. It’s a ruby gem which provides information in-page about the speed of processing the request. It shows the number of queries and what parts of your code take the longest. I like running it in my dev environment as it helps me to quickly review the performance of each page.
Read moreLaravel - The future of PHP apps
Over my career as a web developer, I have unsurprisingly worked with PHP quite a bit and used my fair share of PHP frameworks. I’ve developed custom PHP apps, large scale Drupal products and I’ve configured and customised WordPress blogs.
Android Push Notifications via Rails
I needed to display a notification on Android devices pushed from a Rails server for a particular app. There’s lots of documentation about it but there’s almost too much. I thought I’d summarise it for this specific purpose here.
2014 Retrospective
I thought I’d write a little note about 2014 before we get too far into 2015.
Read moreCollections in Jekyll
Jekyll has introduced something called collections (beta at the time of writing) which has been added to handle custom post/page types.
Read moreHeroku Preboot
Heroku now allows zero-downtime deployment with their Preboot add-on! How did I miss that?? This will be great for some of my Ruby on Rails apps.
Read moreThanks RubyMotion Dispatch
My post about integrating Google+ into RubyMotion was mentioned on RubyMotion Dispatch which was nice. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to others. Check it out here: RubyMotion Dispatch Sept 2014 Archive.
Read moreRubyMotion & Google iOS SDK
I needed a way to login with Google+ in the RubyMotion iOS app I’m building. After having used the Facebook iOS SDK, I expected it to be relatively painless.
iOS Switch on change action
I’ve been using RubyMotion recently to build an iOS app for a client. It’s really good fun!
It turns out that there’s an easy way to perform actions, such as saving, when toggling a switch in RubyMotion. I’m using Formotion but the same approach should work without it.
Garage to Office
For my first year being full time self-employed (2013), I worked in what is essentially the spare room. It was perfectly fine for the time. But towards the end of the year, I started to want to have my own space. The ease at which I was getting distracted made me want a separate and dedicated space. I also wanted separation in order for my business to have a little more of its own identity.
Read moreStanding Desk
So, like many, I’ve wanted to try a standing desk for a while now. Having recently moved into my new office space (aka the garage), it seemed like a good time to set one up.
Read moreStarting up
I quit my job 3 months ago. The job I quit was a good senior development job, one with a company with big ambitions & full of great people. I’m a web developer and I want more.
Read moreThis Space
This is where I may ramble on about projects I’ve been involved in, things I’ve discovered during development, the tools that I use and just random things about myself.
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