Colin Wren – Medium

Published in The Startup

·Pinned

Building My First App — JiffyCV

My first ever app — JiffyCV — is now in beta! Here’s the story about how it came to be, the approach I took to make it and what I’ve… — 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 …

Software Development

19 min read

May 12

Making it easier to keep tabs on your projects using Retool

It‘s hard to keep on top of your projects performance as the list of services to log into grows, use Retool to bring that data to you — After the first COVID lockdown hit the UK in 2020 I was bit by the entrepreneurial bug and since then I’ve built a number of products, namely JiffyCV, Reciprocal.dev and now I’m working on Clime. One of the pain points I’ve had with the whole experience of building these products…

Product Development

10 min read

Making it easier to keep tabs on your projects using Retool

May 5

I’m now a Pencil Pirate

Earlier this year I bought myself an e-course called Pencil Pirates which teaches atomic visuals. Here’s what I learned — For my birthday earlier this year I bought myself a little treat, an e-course called Pencil Pirates which advertises itself as teaching the creation of atomic visuals. Atomic visuals are quick to draw and quick to understand visual representations of the points you’re trying to get across to the reader…

Illustration

3 min read

Apr 30

What I done did in April 2022

I finally emerged from my Covid bunker to go see family — I finally emerged from my Covid bunker to go see family Went down to London for the first time in 2 years There was a four bank holiday in April that happened to coincide with my girlfriend’s birthday during which she wanted to go down to London and suggested that I go with so we can both see family. …

4 min read

Apr 24

An intro to building plugins for Figma with create-figma-plugin

The Figma SDK is really mature and well documented but create-figma-plugin makes it much easier to get started building a plugin for Figma — After the launch of the Reciprocal.dev alpha late last year we took a step back and thought about the tools our potential customers would be using and how we could bring our visualisation techniques to where our users would be needing them most. We started with a Miro plugin because…

Figma

8 min read

Published in JavaScript in Plain English

·Apr 19

How to Add an API to Your Neo4J Graph with @neo4j/graphql

A guide on adding an API to your Neo4J graph with the @neo4j/graphql library. — In order to prove that the concept behind my new product — Clime (an app for connecting product knowledge across multiple tools) was technically feasible, I created a proof-of-concept using Neo4J as the problem lends itself well to graph databases. After creating a basic set of nodes and establishing relationships…

Neo 4 J

6 min read

Apr 7

Iterating my way to a product landing page via user testing with Maze

I’ve got a new idea for a product but instead of jumping into an MVP I built a landing page to see if people want the product first — While working on my side-hustle — Reciprocal.dev (a tool for visualising user journeys and annotating them development data) I realised that there was a higher level issue that gets in the way of teams being able to quickly build shared understanding (what Reciprocal.dev looks to do via it’s visualisations).

Product Development

12 min read

Iterating my way to a product landing page via user testing with Maze

Mar 31

What I done did in March 2022

I read so many Pokemon books — I read so many Pokemon books Recovered from COVID At the end of February I ended up getting COVID after avoiding it for almost two years and it took me a good couple of weeks to recover after getting past the initial symptoms. I’m really hoping that I don’t have to go through…

2 min read

Mar 27

Reading all the Pokemon Adventures Manga (so far anyway)

My goal for 2022 was to read all of the Pokemon Adventures manga and after some hiccups I’ve finally done it — In my plans for 2022 post at the start of the year I stated my goals for this year. One of those goals was to read all of the Pokemon Adventures manga as I had started reading the first chapter in the series in 2021 and was really drawn in…

Pokemon

8 min read

Mar 17

Synology DS720+ NAS First Impressions

In order to regain control over my data I’ve bought a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device — Over the last year I’ve been slowly weaning myself off big tech platforms in a bid to take back control of my data. I strongly suspect that the damage for the most part has already been done with both Apple and Google having syphoned snippets of information on me over…

Technology

8 min read