Anyone who knows me knows I am a huge fan of GNU/Linux (Linux to its friends) and I’ve used it almost exclusively as my main computer operating system for both home and work since the early 2000s. I’ve also been a loyal Dropbox customer for as long as I can…

Seventeen years ago, seventeen people¹ spent a weekend in Utah and the world of software development changed forever. The Manifesto The delegates emerged from that ski resort with a one-page document called the Agile Manifesto: four values, backed by twelve principles, which distilled all their combined industry transformation experience. The Manifesto took…

Software does things. And when it does them, we often want to tell users what has happened. For example, telling them that something has saved successfully, or that an error has occurred. There are many ways to do this, but one of my favourites is the Material Design snackbar. This…

If you followed along with the last post, you will have created a working decoupled Nuxt (Vue.js) & Rails API application in development using Docker. Docker also excels in production, and it wouldn’t take too much effort to tweak those Dockerfiles and deploy it to something like Rancher, if that’s…

I’ve been a huge fan of Ruby on Rails since the early days, and although the web world has moved on a lot since then, Rails still has a place in this landscape, for rapid app development with clean, maintainable code. But the web world has changed. The rise of…

Every software developer has to do their fair share of tech support, and I’m no exception. Of course no software is perfect, especially if it is solving a complex problem, and sometimes things do go wrong. I also find myself supporting other people’s products in my volunteer capacity as “the…

Fish Percolator is a small software development house that often helps startups get their technology off the ground by turning someone’s ideas into a reality that they can click on and play with. There are lots of other people out there doing what I do, but many of them avoid…

Oh hey! It’s been a long time since I posted anything on here! Inspired by a question over on Freelance Heroes, I thought I’d write a post about how to keep your web apps secure when you don’t have nerds on your payroll. Web apps: it’s almost impossible to run…

One of the common challenges I face as a software developer is explaining what I do in lay terms. Why would someone hire Fish Percolator instead of, say, a web developer or a digital agency? Within the industry, there is terminology to describe this distinction: web developers typically build websites…