Getting Interview Questions In Advance


Web Developer with a job (has a great big beard). Web Developer without a job (is clean shaven).

My friend, the superhero Jess Rose, posed an interesting question. are you giving your interview questions to the candidate in advance? If not, why not? I've just conducted interviews for some senior roles at work. We run a structured interview process where every candidate gets asked the same set of questions. The interviewers record their […]

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Designing for people who don't want to use your service


A government website.

I've been building digital products and services since the dial-up era. I spent many years working in the private sector. Good design is seen as a necessity. Customers will switch to another service which is easier to use, has a better app, or offers a nicer experience. I now work in the public sector, where […]

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Relaunching @edent_solar. Part 4 - Dual String MPPT APIs


Graph showing the difference between east and west panels.

I'm hooking my solar panels up to the Internet! Installation Inverter API & Code My solar panels have an API! It tells me the total amount of power they've generated each day. But there's a small problem... I have panels on the East and West sides of my roof. My solar inverter has two MPPT […]

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Relaunching @edent_solar. Part 3 - API & Code


Solar Graph.

I'm hooking my solar panels up to Twitter! Installation Inverter Fronius provide a comprehensive API guide - I wish more companies did this. There are lots of unofficial libraries in a variety of different languages. I've written this code in Python3. This is a general tidy-up of the code I wrote several years ago. Here's […]

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Relaunching @edent_solar. Part 2 - Inverter


A big grey box with lots of wires coming out of it.

Having solar panels on your roof is great - but you need something to turn their wicked DC electricity into pure and godly AC. This bit of kit is called an "inverter". It's a big box which lives in your roof working magic. This is what ours looks like: We chose a Fronius Primo inverter […]

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Relaunching @edent_solar. Part 1 - installation


Roof of our house.

A few years ago, we installed solar panels on our roof in Oxford - I've enjoyed blogging about them. I've released open data from them, inspected them with a drone, and measured what happened during a solar eclipse. They've even been on the BBC! But the best thing I did, was release this little Twitter […]

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Manual Of Me


Some crappy hand drawings.

At a recent Staff Away-Day, we were encouraged to write a "Manual of Me". A quick summary of the general ways that you like to work. I don't spend much time on introspection and I found it disturbingly personal. So here's mine for you to enjoy! Excuse my crappy drawing and even crappier spelling. Here's […]

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"file:///C:/users"


List of Tweets where people have pasted a link to their local machine.

Once in a while, I'll see someone Tweet a "link" to file:///C:/users/... - that's the Microsoft Windows way of representing a location on a filesystem. Usually this means that the user has tried to either drag 'n' drop something, or copied a link from their file explorer. There are some (mild) infosec risks you should […]

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2019 🆚 2020


First headline in the Daily Mail online reads "Medical student, 20, says foreign exchange trading will make him a millionaire by the time he is 21 as he poses with gold-wrapped £50,000 Maserati". The second headline, a few months later says "Insta-SCAM: 'Get rich quick' Instagram trader, 20, 'empties accounts of more than 1,000 investors in £3.5m fraud' - three days after UK medical student posed with Ferrari at Eiffel Tower"

*sigh* These scams are really common. And pretty easy to pull off. Renting an expensive sports car for a day is relatively cheap. Drive it to some fancy locations, wear a couple of rented designer clothes, perhaps pay for a pretty model to pose as your girlfriend, take a load of photos and you can […]

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Accessibility is a public health issue


A tweet which says "From the chair of surgery at Columpbia Presbyterian." There is a big blank image afterwards.

Dark times, my friends. Dark times. It's up to all of us to pull together. And that means making vital health information accessible. One of the easiest things you can do is make your Twitter content accessible is by adding descriptions to your images. Go to twitter.com/settings/accessibility and turn on "Compose image descriptions". Here's why. […]

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