There's a football manager game I got for my birthday when I was nine years old: FIFA Soccer Manager 97. I spent countless hours playing it as a child, trying to win the league, the cup or just avoid getting the sack! Two years later I got a newer manager game with better graphics and more...
I realised I hadn't blogged anything outdoorsy for an awfully long time. I used to occasionally post about travels and adventures, or my kayaking in general, but I guess I haven't done anything blogworthy in a while. I've been kayaking (on-and-off) for over twenty years, mostly in the Lake District...
Last Summer I wrote about building my own static site generator called Beemo. I went on to use it as the generator for a few other websites I manage, and made a few enhancements along the way. Beemo Recently I had the idea to use lars (a web server log analyser written by Dave Jones) as the...
Last week was PyCon UK, which took place in Manchester for the first time. I've attended the conference every year it's run since 2014, and each year I've given a talk. This year I decided not to submit a talk, instead trying my hand at running a workshop on "Data modelling with Pydantic". Luckily,...
I have a habit of revamping my website every few years. Since starting on Blogger some ... 19 years ago I've moved between platforms and redesigned the layout several times over. This time I decided to go for a static site build, which means not requiring managing WordPress plugins and updates, or...
Cambridge-based hosting company Mythic Beasts — long-time friends of Raspberry Pi people and products — launched a unique service back in 2016: Raspberry Pi hosting, what they call their "Pi Cloud". When I developed the first version of piwheels, it made sense to make use of this service to...
I was back in Cardiff for PyCon UK recently and gave a talk on a BBC project I've been working on, called Live Highlights. I'm not doing as many conference talks as I used to – this is my only one of the year! I spoke about how we prototyped an idea and built it up to be used in audience-facing...
I've now completed my second full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. Another year working from home; the team officially moved into BBC R&D; and I was promoted to senior engineer. In 2021 I worked on: mosromgr, a Python library for managing TV and radio running...
Following the success of my article The surreal experience of my first developer job, which made it to the top of Hacker News for a whole day, I was invited to tell the story on the excellent podcast Client Horror Stories. The video is available on clienthorrorstories.com: Thanks to Morgan for...
For the last few months in BBC News Labs, I've been working on various projects involving extracting metadata from running orders for BBC programmes such as Newsnight and the R4 Today programme. Like many traditional broadcasters, the BBC uses the MOS Protocol for communications between newsroom...
