General

I was talking with a fellow programmer the other day about a poor test that we were reviewing and we got onto the subject of what makes a poor test. The test in question had a reliance on a previous test being run, and the problem we encountered was that on some systems the dependent test was run after this test, which caused it to fail.

This also caused some headaches in local development as it couldn't be run in isolation. We had to ensure that both tests were run, in the correct order.

After fixing the tests so that they could be run independently I created a list of some common problems that programmers might come across when writing tests. These rules can be applied to most coding test, not just unit tests or behavioural tests.

2022 marks 20 years since I started my MSc in computer science degree at the University of Aberystwyth. So, I thought I would take a look back at my thesis for the degree and see how far I have come since then.

The title of my thesis was "Using The Java3D API To Visualise Molecular Compounds". I used a system called Java3D to create ball and stick models of molecules. A second requirement was to allow the application to compare two molecules together.

The course I did was known as a conversion course and was designed to compress the three years of the undergraduate computer science degree into a single year, along with an introduction to Java programming bootcamp the summer before the course started. This was a year of hard work with 12 hour days and weekends of constant study. The drop out rate for the course was about 80%, with most of that being in the first few weeks.

I have been a web developer for quite a few years, and one constant that is an unfortunate story in the industry is the rescue project. This is a web project that has been mismanaged by an agency or developer in some way so that the site is at a critical point. Either, the site is unable to launch or it has already been launched and suffers from serious issues. Projects in this state are caused by a variety of factors, and can be challenging and difficult to turn around.

Some agencies, quite understandably, won't go near rescue projects as they can be extremely tricky to manage. The client will have already invested money in getting the site in the first place, so spending money to fix the site can be a little painful for them. This is especially the case for small business sites, clubs or charities without any extra funds.

Picture the scene, it's 2010, you're a young web developer working in a satellite office of a fast paced digital agency. The work is interesting, but normally quite stressful as there are tight deadlines and high expectations on delivering good work. There is a lot going on so you tend to finish one website and jump onto the next.

The company you work for has a history of firing people and making people redundant, especially in the satellite office you work at. Low morale, a culture of blame, and absolutely zero investment in people means that there is very little enthusiasm for the work from anyone. The economy is still recovering from the collapse of the banking system from a couple of years before.

You have a young family at home and so you'll put up with a lot of poor working conditions to ensure a pay cheque every month.

Something I've been writing long hand for a number of years is wrap around increments. This is essentially adding to a value that has an upper limit, and wrapping back to 0 when that max value is reached. This can be done with an if statement.

Having a chat feature on your website (commonly called 'live chat') is useful when helping your users overcome any difficulties they are having. You can pop up a little chat window in the page and ask if they need any help finding what they need. This can be especially useful on large commerce sites where users might get stuck looking for things.

The addition of a chatbot also allows you to automatically answer some of more common questions. For example, if a user asks where they can find the delivery and returns policy then a chatbot can automatically respond with a response. These rules can get more complicated, but it depends on what you instruct the bot to answer to.

Tests for programmers in an interview process are not uncommon. For the last couple of years I have asked a quick pre-interview question to junior developers to see what sort of stuff they come up with.

As I don't want to set any developer a task that will take longer than absolutely needed I opted to set a very simple task for them. Commonly known as "FizzBuzz", this task is as follows.

"Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the multiples of five print "Buzz". For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print "FizzBuzz"."

The expected output for this would be something like this.

Colourising images is fairly simple to accomplish, especially using PHP's GD library. All we need to do is load an image, create a blank image of the same size in a particular colour and then merge the two images together.

In fact, we can do this entirely with the imagecopymerge() function, but creating a function to wrap all of this makes sense as well.

The following function takes an image resource (as created by imagecreatefrompng()), the red, green, and blue values of the colour, and the percentage to overlay the colour on top of the image. The percentage can be set to 0 for no effect and 100 to fully replace the image with the given colour.

For the second year running I attended BSides Manchester conference, held at the Manchester Metropolitan University Business School on Thursday 16th August. This is a technical cybersecurity conference that is organised by a dedicated team of volunteers. I was really impressed by last years conference so was really keen on attending this year.

I recently attended the BSides Manchester conference, which was held at Manchester Metropolitan University Business School on 17th August 2017. This was a security and hacking conference that was free to attend, but had a very limited number of tickets available. After missing the first two releases of tickets I managed to get one from the waiting list.

After some introductions we got started with the first talk of the day, which was Dominic Chell & Vincent Ylu talking about A Year In The Red. As a non-security professional I had to Google exactly what some of the terms in this talk meant. So apparently red team refers to a security consultancy who are hired to attack a system or network. Conversely, blue team is a security team that is resident within an organisation. A funny talk with some good demonstrations of hacking attacks.