Google do a lot of good things. They host free webfonts to make the web a nicer place to be. Their cloudy PaaS service, Engine Yard, gets rave reviews. Their maps are better than anyone’s, their mobile OS is the most popular in the world, and their photo hosting offer is second to none. But they…
Technology
aspnetcore.dll failed to load. The data is the error
This morning, while trying to debug our big ol’ web project in Visual Studio 2015 I encountered a problem – it held me up for a while so I wanted to quickly blog about the solution in case it hits you too. When hitting F5 to start debugging, Chrome launched but then immediately Visual Studio…
Things I learned at my last job
Today I closed a chapter in my life. After nearly 4 years tenure at a company I wanted to reflect on the things I learned over that time. I have been very lucky to have a few excellent – world-class even – mentors here who have taught me things that will stay with me for the…
The Sharing Economy
The ‘Sharing Economy’ is disrupting established industries and sending huge, powerful incumbents into a tizzy. Uber and AirBnB have shaken the taxi and hotel sectors, shifting power, control and profits from the RadioCabs and Hiltons of this world and into the hands of ordinary citizens armed with nothing more than a smartphone and a mobile data…
Google’s Project Loon
Google are doing a lot of “10X innovation” right now. That is innovation that isn’t just incrementally better than the competition (like a 10% improvement) but a moon-shot, 10-times improvement. One of these initiatives is called Project Loon: You can sometimes see these balloons being tested off the coast of Christchurch, New Zealand, on FlightRadar,…
Swatch Internet Time on Your Desktop
I’ve spoken before about Swatch Internet Time as an option for solving the horrible problems of cross-timezone collaboration. But nobody is adopting it. There are good reasons for this: it’s not overly difficult to work out timezone differences, there are more intuitive alternatives such as using Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), and ultimately nobody is betting…
Generation C
The new leaders of the free world are Generation C. They aren’t an age group, people born between certain arbitrary years such as Generation X or Y, instead it is a mind-set and an attitude. But the really interesting thing is that they don’t know they’re in charge. The C Word The “C” in Generation…
Introducing QuickModules for ASP.NET MVC
Like you I often spend my weekends writing REST APIs for fun. And like you I am often frustrated by the amount of server-side code I need to write just to expose some data to JavaScript. Boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate. Ugh! So this weekend, in between bouts of erratic and unsatisfying jetlag-sleep, I decided to try…