One of the nice things about working with open source software is that sometimes you get to contribute back to a project and (hopefully) add some useful features or improvements. We’ve just spent about 15 months working with OpenSource Connections on a project for a major client in the legal search area, who were transitioning Read More…
Presenting Jack Ryan, 2018
The Jack Ryan project was a major promotion for the Amazon Jack Ryan TV series, which we worked on for our friends at We Make Stuff Happen, writing a lot of the software which drove the stand. It was probably the most complex event we’ve been involved with, comprising multiple sets of computers, each with Read More…
The Bearista Tour 2018
This project was put together for the We Bare Bears Bearista Tour, in association with We Make Stuff Happen, which appeared in four cities around the UK on weekends in January 2018. The tour involved life-sized models of the bears, one holding a selfie stick to take pictures of visitors which were then emailed to Read More…
Adding external template locations to Dropwizard
Earlier in the year, as part of my work for Flax, I re-visited a project I had last worked on around two-and-a-half years previously. The client had a library comprising documents and reports of various types, which were entered and modified by hand. The data entry templates needed to look as similar to the source Read More…
Hara hachi bu (腹八分)
There’s a new post on the Flax blog about a project we worked on – Hara hachi bu, an HTTP proxy for checking whether enough disk space is available before trying to add data to a Solr, Elasticsearch or similar data store:
Running out of disk space with Elasticsearch and Solr: a solution
Voting for the safest driver
Just before Christmas, I put together an application for an Aviva installation in Waterloo station, in association with We Make Stuff Happen, so that passers-by could vote for their choice of the safest driver in that day’s category. The installation had two buttons which would cast a vote by posting the user’s choice to Twitter. Read More…
Customising ElasticSearch for BioSolr
I wrote a post on the Flax blog about adding a new mapper plugin to ElasticSearch: The fun and frustration of writing a plugin for Elasticsearch for ontology indexing
Marvellous Milk
This project was for Sport Relief 2014, in association with We Make Stuff Happen for Cravendale Milk. The idea was to gather a team of friends, get on an exercise bicycle, and see how much milkshake you could mix by pedalling as hard as you could for a minute. We had a display screen with Read More…
The Tree of Souls
The first independent job I did, before Elysian Software even existed, was a great deal of fun. At the time, I was still working full-time so this job, for Jeeves Event Solutions (now known as We Make Stuff Happen), was something of a diversion from that, back in early 2010. It was a promotion for Read More…