Hi! I'm Darragh ORiordan. I live and work in Auckland, New Zealand š„ enjoying the ocean š and building things on the web š» Contact me on Twitter!
A retrospective on mentoring four new developers
February 12, 2019
Late last year I had the pleasure of helping a team of students build a prototype for a non-profit here in Auckland. The non-profit needed a prototype to raise more funds and get feedback on their plan. I've helped run teams and mentor junior developers in large organisations. It's much easier because the support, tools, frameworks, systems of the organisation are already available. For this project the student teams had a blank slate and had to decide on everything from how they would communicate with the sponsors to how they would host the software. I wanted to write down what I learned and note some of the mistakes I made so that I have a framework for the next time I help new developers!
read more...When Mocha doesn't run tests in subfolders on either windows or your CI server
January 29, 2019
I use a Windows PC for development and I had a problem where some of my mocha tests were not running on my CI server. The issue was that I use GitLab's CI system which uses a Linux docker image to run the tests so the difference was the OS. This would also affect teams with developers on both Windows machines and Macs. Here's how I fixed it...
read more...Adding static JavaScript files to a react typescript project
January 25, 2019
I had to import a JavaScript in to my React project with typescript and typescript gave me an error. It wasn't causing my build to fail but it was annoying seeing it in the console. Here's how I got rid of the error.
read more...Fixing Docker and docker-compose named pipes error (code2)
January 24, 2019
Docker on Windows 10 sometimes breaks after an upgrade. When you try to list containers or use docker-compose you'll get an error on the command line. Here is an easy way to fix this issue.
read more...Be careful of the JWT hype train
January 23, 2019
Iāve been researching using node as a back end for a few months now and SO MANY node articles, courses and project āstartersā on GitHub suggest using JWT on your client facing API as a session token. I think there's way too much hype around it and people are using JWT because it's shiny!
read more...3 tips for starting and finishing side projects
January 22, 2019
Some of us like to make things for the web but everyone finds it super hard to find time to start and finish any side projects. If you've been thinking about something for a year but haven't even started, here are some tips to help you start and finish more stuff!
read more...How to add Bulma and PrismJs to a Gatsby project avoiding CSS conflicts
January 20, 2019
Bulma is a popular CSS library like bootstrap. It's not too difficult to add to Gatsby but there are some tricky bits where you need some plugins and the CSS classes can conflict.
read more...How to add cors protection to an express application
January 17, 2019
Cors protection is a recommended security configuration for any api. It protects your customers from unexpected attacks by blocking websites you haven't approved. If you have a devOps team they will handle this for you. But if you are a single maker with an application on Heroku and front end on Netlify you need to implement this yourself.
read more...Converting a road bike into an electric bicycle
November 25, 2018
This is the guide I wish I had when I was researching how to convert a 2013 Giant Defy road bike in to an electric bicycle using a Bafang centre drive kit.
read more...Fuzzy Friday
May 31, 2018
Hi, thanks for signing up to the newsletter. Mary Meeker (Kleiner Perkins) has released the [state of the internet report][1] for 2018 - 294 pages of awesome . Personalised shopping and mobile advertising are growing like CRAZY!
read more...Setting up a macbook for a windows developer
March 25, 2018
I recently got a macbook at work and I'm doing only web development these days so no Visual Studio. I had to do a bit of reading to get things set up and I don't want to do it again so here is a post for me!
read more...The Customer Workshop
November 21, 2017
I lead a team of developers that work on one of the busiest New Zealand websites. We have ~4 million members and ~850,000 unique users every day. Working at this kind of scale means the real people who buy and use our products can get lost behind user personas or Jira ticket numbers. To bridge the gap between my team and their customers I organised a week of hands on outstanding customerā¦
read more...When agile gets dangerous
September 14, 2017
If youāre selling your teams on some form of agile but the reality they work in is completely different, you are damaging and demotivating your teams through confusion and an impossible to achieve vision. If youāve adopted āagileā do yourself a favor and check the health of the adoption right now. Every organisation has a custom agile adoption. Thatās the point, being reactive to what works forā¦
read more...Radical Candor in Practice
August 14, 2017
A.k.a. how to get the truth from your direct reports while you sit back and eat cake. Youāve been a manager for a year and youāre not sure itās all going OK? You donāt know if youāre providing maximum value to your team or which specific aspects of your people leadership to improve? You might be having regular catch ups but youāre not receiving honest leadership feedback, or maybe youāre gettingā¦
read more...Saving your windows lock screen images
July 26, 2017
Here is a quick one. One of my colleagues was trying to figure out how to get the stunning windows lock screen images. They are hidden away in a folder on windows but this script will get them, rename them to .jpg and place them in a folder on your desktop. You have to run it each time you want to get your windows lock screen images. So save the script below to your computer, to run it right clickā¦
read more...Giving your first machine learning workshop
June 20, 2017
Last week I offered to give a workshop on machine learning to share some of what Iāve learned so far. I had 2 goals for my workshop ā first, I wanted to show everyone that they shouldnāt be afraid of machine learning. Second, I wanted to get people set up with anaconda so they can continue to learn themselves. I had a cross functional group of ~10 colleagues ā business analysts, data analysts, UXā¦
read more...Cats and Dogs
May 25, 2017
Last week I had an amazing opportunity to present about machine learning and innovation to 110 people leaders at my company. It was a mixed audience of technical and non technical people. My message is that machine learning needs to be understood by everyone in the business, not just the data scientists. Domain knowledge with machine learning will really enable successful data projects. Here areā¦
read more...Startup Weekend
May 25, 2017
Wow, itās a week after Startup Weekend Auckland. Iāve had time to get my thoughts straight about the whole experience. I learned a hell of a lot of positive lessons about idea validation, about myself and about working in teams. Friday Night We started the event on Friday night with a brief introduction to the format and some key organizers. Thirty enthusiastic 60 second pitches quickly followedā¦
read more...Create-react-app react-router and Heroku
April 30, 2017
Iāve been putting together a React app and I needed cheap, fast hosting so I went to put it on Heroku. Configuring Heroku The community have put together a build pack for create-react-app. You can basically deploy in 2 minutes. Assuming you have the heroku command line tool already configured the following gist describes the commands to setup the build pack: https://gist.github.com/darraghoriordanā¦
read more...Entering my first kaggle competition
February 28, 2017
Three weeks ago I discovered the fast.ai course. They offer a practical deep learning course for coders where you get straight in to building neural networks. They provide a huge amount of support through wikis, forums, aws scripts and tooling, videos and book recommendations. AI competitions The first step in this AI course is building an neural network for detecting cats and dogs in images usingā¦
read more...Fuzzy Friday
February 24, 2017
From lunch to acquisition, how Atlassian bought Trello . Success stories from developers who started at age 35,40,45 . Why Basecamp chose profit over venture capital. How do you measure leadership? from YCombinator. Folk musician Jesse had his Youtube account hacked and lost all hist fans and likes. No recourse from Google so heās starting again . The power of internet giants to have hugeā¦
read more...Swagger UI: Custom HMAC hash authenticationn headers
February 19, 2017
Last year I launched a new API for an integration project. Itās using Microsoftās WebApi framework. I was looking for a fast way to document the API so I wouldnāt have to do much work and clients could use the API easily. After some research it was obvious that I needed Swagger. Swagger Swagger () is an open source framework that makes it really easy to design, build and document APIs. At itāsā¦
read more...Webstock 2017 Part 1
February 19, 2017
Web Stock is tech conference like no other, held in Wellington, New Zealand. Once again I left feeling energized and impassioned after listening to all the speakers on such a wide range of subjects. These are my summaries and donāt even come close to describing the full scope and quality of each talk. Use only as a guide to hear more. Iāll add links when the videos are released. I also may haveā¦
read more...Webstock 2017 Part 2
February 19, 2017
Web Stock is tech conference like no other, held in Wellington, New Zealand. Once again I left feeling energized and impassioned after listening to all the speakers on such a wide range of subjects. Day 2 Jonathon Colman ( @jcolman ) ā Wicked Ambiguity and UX Introduced Tame vs Wicked problems . Some examples of wicked problems ā Designing to communicate with aliens and designing to warn peopleā¦
read more...Fuzzy Friday
February 14, 2017
Seth Godin wants us to stop calling them soft-skills . A beautiful photo story of Faberge and his eggs . The surprising ways Facebook collects and uses your data , especially when you donāt think they are. Deep learning will change everything . Enjoy and thanks for reading! dar Subscribe here: https://tinyletter.com/darraghor Related
read more...Smart Bear Ready API
February 02, 2017
I recently had a problem where our test analysts use Ready API software from Smart bear but our API authentication does a custom hashing function on the content. For tests to work we had to hash the entire request and apply headers for each test step. There is an events hook in Ready API where you can add Java code to be run for event triggers. Unwrapping the content in the available requestā¦
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