Colin Wren – Medium

Published in The Startup

·Pinned

Building My First App — JiffyCV

My first ever app — JiffyCV — is now live! Here’s the story about how it came to be, the approach I took to make it and what I learned along the way. You find out more about the app on our website https://jiffycv.com or find it in the app…

Software Development

19 min read

Software Development

19 min read

Mar 11

Enhance your shitposting with FFMPEG

I was watching one my favourite movies — An American Werewolf in London the other day and realised that the scene where the doctor visits the Slaughtered Lamb and asks about the Pentagram on the wall would make a good joke about team’s attitudes to legacy code by…

Ffmpeg

3 min read

Ffmpeg

3 min read

Feb 25

Authenticating via Microsoft Azure AD in Cypress (and Puppeteer)

Recently I found myself having to automate a Single Sign On (SSO) implementation that used Microsoft Azure AD as the indentity provider and encountered some issues which I thought were worth sharing. It’s worth noting that what I’m about to describe is an anti-pattern in Cypress, they recommend not automating…

Automation Testing

3 min read

Authenticating via Microsoft Azure AD in Cypress (and Puppeteer)

Automation Testing

3 min read

Feb 19

midi-to-lsdj development update

I’ve just released v1.5.0 of midi-to-lsdj my little library for converting MIDI files into the commands needed to reproduce the song in Little Sound DJ (LSDJ) on the Gameboy. What’s new MIDI file parsing has moved from midi-file to @tonejs/midi Moved to using tonalJS for working with notes Support for tempo changes…

Music

9 min read

Music

9 min read

Feb 5

What I’ve learned after taking a four-month sabbatical from work

In October 2022 I started a sabbatical from work. My employer at the time (I’ve since left that job and start a new one next week) had a policy that allowed those with three years of service (I had six) to take up to three months off unpaid, I had…

Life

7 min read

What I’ve learned after taking a four-month sabbatical from work

Life

7 min read

Jan 29

My experince learning Kotlin with Jetbrains Academy

I’m starting a new job soon at a company that uses Kotlin, a language I’d never used before so I decided while I had some downtime between jobs to learn the basics so I wouldn’t start and be completely out of my comfort zone. I had used Scala previously and…

Learning

5 min read

Learning

5 min read

Jan 22

Building a shared understanding of your application with Sketch.systems

Over the last couple of months I’ve been getting into statecharts. It started while playing around with porting Reciprocal.dev (RIP) to work on top of tldraw as that uses them and since then, I’ve experimented with Stately’s excellent Xstate-based editor and then I found Sketch.systems. Sketch.systems takes statechart visualisation a…

Software Development

6 min read

Building a shared understanding of your application with Sketch.systems

Software Development

6 min read

Jan 16

My trip to Reykjavik, Iceland

After my trip to Denmark, Sweden and Norway in November 2022 I still had some credit with British Airways left to use by September 2023. Due to exchange rates I actually ended up with a fair amount to spend, so the girlfriend and I decided to go back to Iceland. …

5 min read

5 min read

Jan 2

My Plans for 2023

Looking back on my plans for 2022 I achieved four out of eight of the things I set out to do: Move to self-hosted tech stack: I found a NAS that I liked and have for the most part managed to migrate off iCloud and a bunch of SaaS products…

6 min read

6 min read

Dec 30, 2022

My 2022

This year was a little more exciting than 2021! I’ve been promoted, taken a sabbatical and moved to a different company. I gave up my entreprenerial dream Looking back at my 2021 wrap-up I was excited at how I’d develop Reciprocal.dev further after a successful MVP but unfortunately in January my day job project had a…

6 min read