Jack McKew's Blog

Designing for Change not Requirements

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 15 January 2021 in Software • Tagged with software, principles • 2 min read

Change is inevitable in everything, so why not consider it in the design phase of a project. By designing for inevitable change this safeguards projects from a myriad of future hurdles. This post was inspired by the Weekly Dev Tips episode: https://www.weeklydevtips.com/episodes/requirements-and-change-with-guest-juval-lowy.

Typically projects usually …

Typography With Matplotlib

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 08 January 2021 in Python • Tagged with python, visualisation • 3 min read

Typography is 'the style and appearance of printed matter', so in this post we're going to make some typography art with Matplotlib, we're going to make use of some text and colour the words which are colours themmselves (eg, the colour red will be coloured red). This is an interesting …

Define Functions Iteratively With Python

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 01 January 2021 in Python • Tagged with python, software-development • 4 min read

An interesting problem came up recently, there was a piece of code absolutely full of the same function calls over and over again, meaning if anything ever need to change, that would have to be changed in over 500 places, not ideal. Thoughts go back to single responsbility, and don't …

Getting Started with P5.js

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 25 December 2020 in Javascript • Tagged with javascript, data-viz • 2 min read

In this post we're going to make use of the library P5.js which enables us to create interactive visualisation in the browser. We're going to create an interactive pond where users will be able to click on the screen to create a new drop in the pond and watch …

Differential Privacy

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 18 December 2020 in Data Science • Tagged with datascience, python • 4 min read

It's quite clear in today's age that the biggest companies in the world, make most of their profits from harvesting and productionalising their user's data. With privacy becoming more and more of a concern in everyday life as we become more connected, it's almost becoming a human right for our …

Releasing Cordova Apps on Google Play & App Store

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 11 December 2020 in Software • Tagged with Software, javascript • 4 min read

This post is going to go into how to upload and release a Cordova app on both the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store. Cordova is an open source framework that wraps HTML/Javascript apps into a native container which can access the device's functionality, akin to a …

Deploy a Node Web App to AWS Elastic Beanstalk with Docker

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 04 December 2020 in Software • Tagged with software • 3 min read

We've gone through how to use Docker to help develop our web applications, now we want to be able to deploy them out in the wild. Let's use Amazon Web Services (AWS) Elastic Beanstalk to do this. Note that there is a free tier of AWS that we can make …

Deploying with Kubernetes

Posted by Jack McKew on Thu 26 November 2020 in Software • Tagged with software • 4 min read

Following on with previous posts on this blog. This post will be going through how to deploy our fibonacci application we previously built in a Kubernetes cluster. To reiterate we will be using the following technologies:

Technology	Use
Docker	Docker will be used to containerization of the services inside our …

Developing with Kubernetes

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 20 November 2020 in Software • Tagged with software • 5 min read

Following on with previous posts on this blog. This post will be going through how to develop & later on deploy our fibonacci application we previously built in a multi-container context. To reiterate we will be using the following technologies:

Technology	Use
Docker	Docker will be used to containerization of the …

Intro to Kubernetes

Posted by Jack McKew on Fri 13 November 2020 in Software • Tagged with software • 4 min read

Kubernetes is a portable, extensible, open-source platform for managing containerized workloads and services, that facilitates both declarative configuration and automation. We use Kubernetes as a platform for orchestrating multiple Docker containers for our application, and enables us to scale our application easily.

Kubernetes is managed via a master node, and …

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