Brendan McKenzie

I work for a digital agency - Deepend. We primarily build and maintain content managed websites for clients. We are platform and technology agnostic meaning we deal with a lot of different programming languages, operating systems and databases. That's great for me because it gives me the freedom to play with a whole assortment of toys.

Yesterday I completed my first ever Spartan Race. Leading up to it I was nervous and excited. Excited for all the obstacles, nervous because it had been so cold lately that I was scared I'd get hypothermia.

One of the hardest questions to be asked as a programmer who primarily does web development is: 'How much for a website?' It's one of those questions that doesn't really have an exact answer. 'How much do you want to pay for a website?' is probably a better question.

I was tasked with implementing some extra levels of validation on the registration form of a website I built. Registration was a simple AngularJS form that hit an ASP.NET WebAPI endpoint.

Umbraco is a powerful CMS that isn't overly intrusive. It can work nicely side-by-side your web appliction providing a nice and easy way to manage dynamic content pages. The latest version also has a nice fresh UI.

It's a terrible name, but maybe one day I'll figure a better one. Either way...

I was looking for a method to abstract away integrating my RESTful services for regular CRUD operations. There's ngResource, but it's a bit voodoo and restrictive. I wanted to come up with a solution that was a bit more simplictic that's also not surrounded by magic.

I am currently developing a website that will entirely be a Single Page Application (SPA). I started building the back-end in D and the front-end in AngularJS. I decided after a couple of weeks that Jeff Atwood was right in saying 'Storage is cheap, programmers are expensive.' Though D is a useful language, it was taking me too long to produce useful RESTful API endpoints, so I decided to make the switch to Flask given my familiarity with it.

I have spent the last few days learning a bit of D, I have contributed to a library, written my own library and developed a basic understanding of the language. It comes across as a very powerful and developer-friendly language. However there are a few downsides to it.

In the ideal world is a great way to start any thought, then reality comes in and kills all your big ideas.