Heard about an artist you want to listen to? Or a podcast that has peaked your interest? Listen Later allows you to curate a list of albums, artists, episodes, podcasts and songs to listen to later
with Spotify.
After unsuccessfully trying to maintain a list to this effect using playlists in Spotify, and
finding a number of Spotify Community forum threads with people wanting the same functionality,
I decided to build a web application to solve this problem.
For more information, see the post about the project on LinkedIn.
I've been using and enjoying Tim Narr's
Valley Theme for Visual Studio Code for over
a year, and wanted to bring its colour palette to my preferred terminal for a more unified development
experience.
Having ported the theme to a Windows Terminal scheme a couple of months ago, I thought it was
about time that I shared it on GitHub!
Starting in September 2020, I'll be transitioning to freelance software development work through
my own business, Spirited Machine!
I'll be bringing the experience and knowledge gained during over five years of varied commercial
software development at companies inlcuding a bespoke software development house, a household
name online estate agent and progressive tech startups to offer best practice software
engineering services to businesses of all sizes.
To see all of my past commercial experience, please
see my LinkedIn profile.
To find out more about what I'll be offering in my freelance endeavours, or to get in touch
regarding software development needs, please
visit the Spirited Machine website.
I’ve been using Azure DevOps Pipelines (formerly Builds & Releases) for continuous
integration and continuous deployment for around eighteen months. Overall, I’ve found it really
good to work with (especially given that it’s freely available for open source projects -
see Azure DevOps Services pricing).
One Pipelines feature that we found ourselves wanting at GivePenny was the ability to see which
pipelines are broken at a glance.
Initially, we used Dashboards in Azure DevOps to achieve this. The downside to this approach was
that new panels had to be added to the dashboard for each new microservice we created.
To solve this issue, I developed a Pipeline Monitoring solution using
Blazor WebAssembly
and the
Azure DevOps REST API.
The Pipeline Monitoring solution is a simple SPA that accepts an Azure DevOps Organisation,
Project and PAT token, and displays (by default) the broken and in progress pipelines.
Although Blazor WebAssembly is not yet production ready, we've been using the Pipeline
Monitoring solution internally at GivePenny for a number of months.
The
Pipeline Monitoring site
is now
open source on GitHub, and is
being continually deployed to Google Firebase (hosted as a static site) using an Azure DevOps
Pipeline.
In February of this year Purplebricks held its first hackathon.
The hackathon's theme was innovation, and it ran over the course of twelve hours, 9:00 to 21:00.
My team's submission was a property search chat bot, built using Microsoft's Azure Bot Service
and the LUIS (Language Understanding Intelligent Service) cognitive service for natural language
understanding. The bot interfaced with the existing Purplebricks Property Search API, gleaming
filters from the user's input. For example the phrase "I'm looking to rent a flat in Solihull"
would search for a property of type "flat", in the location "Solihull" and show only properties
to let.
The day was a really interesting view into working in a different way and collaborating in a
very fast paced environment. When the day wrapped up we felt a real sense of achievement about
what we'd managed to build in such a short amount of time, and it was great to see each of the
teams' submissions.
For more information on the implementation of the chat bot, please see my
blog post
on our submission.
