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andrewdavey

1,276 karma · joined March 14, 2009

http://www.hackernewsers.com/users/andrewdavey.html
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andrewdavey··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2018)
Insight Tracking | Junior or Senior Full-stack .NET Web Developer | Hayle, Cornwall, UK | Full time | £30,000—£40,000

We're small, fully bootstrapped, software as a service company. Our main product is an assessment tracking web app for primary schools. We currently have over 360 schools nationally and are growing rapidly.

Our customers love the system and send us great feedback! https://www.insighttracking.com/testimonials

We're a four-person team, focused on delivering excellent customer support. You'd be working closely with our main developer, as well as the customer support team. There are plenty of new features to build and existing things to improve.

From a tech point of view, the server-side runs on a mixture of ASP.NET MVC and Web API, which talk to RavenDB and SQL Server. The front-end has a legacy Angular UI, but newer screens are built using React.

We're not bogged down by bureaucracy and meetings. We aim to keep the process lightweight, with a focus on rapidly delivering great software.

Being based in the seaside town of Hayle means we're close to the beach and the countryside. It's a chilled out town, with good connections to other parts of Cornwall. Remote work is also a possibility, however being UK-based would be preferred.

Skills we need: Experience with C# and .NET, especially ASP.NET; Experience with HTML, CSS and JavaScript; Basic knowledge of SQL Server; Basic knowledge of Git

Perks: Your choice of computer hardware; Sit/stand desk and ergonomic chair; Full-time here is just 30 hours a week (flexi-time); In addition to the usual 28 days holiday plus bank holidays, take unlimited unpaid leave during school summer holidays; Regular team outings (recently we've completed an Escape; Room, played Skittles, learned to make Easter Eggs and spent the day in VR); Work-place pension, with up to 15% matched contributions; Free snacks, coffee, etc; Close to the beach!

Email andrew@insighttracking.com

andrewdavey··on Unit Testing Best Practices in AngularJS
If you need end-to-end, browser-based, testing as well, check out Protractor: https://github.com/angular/protractor/blob/master/README.md

It's built on top of WebDriverJS. I've been playing with it today and so far it's working very well.

andrewdavey··on How I automated the boring parts of life
They can't do anything that requires your credit card: http://www.fancyhands.com/not/good/for
andrewdavey··on Static Asset Compilation
Also check out Cassette http://getcassette.net/
andrewdavey··on Introducing (Unofficial) GitHub Buttons
Also check out http://gitforked.com/

I made it earlier this year, but didn't get the HN love :) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2279450

andrewdavey··on What's New in the .NET Framework 4.5
RavenDB http://ravendb.net/ is an excellent document database written in .NET. It leverages lots of LINQ and C# 4.0's dynamic abilities to provide a really clean API. I'm sure it'll soon be taking advantage of the new async stuff coming in C# 5.0 as well.

It's open source as well. Well worth a look.

andrewdavey··on Browser testing sucks, it's time to start doing it right.
Reducing tight coupling is definitely a concern I'm looking into. I can't see there being any silver bullets, but a good framework should certainly encourage a sustainable way of working.

I've developed a rather nice asynchronous, sequential, execution model for test code. So they avoid the callback-hell you'd see with multi-step async tests. The spin assert idea mentioned in the article is very useful, and I'll be borrowing it for sure! :)

I'm wary of running tests in parallel, due to concurrency issues. However, I guess spinning up multiple web servers and in-memory databases would work fine.

andrewdavey··on Browser testing sucks, it's time to start doing it right.
I see a big problems in web testing caused trying to test drive from outside of the browser. I'm currently working on a solution that has tests written in javascript that run inside the browser. The test runner puts your web app into an iframe, so the test code can use jQuery, for example, to easily automate and assert over the UI.

JavaScript also makes creating a very clean testing-focused DSL easy.

I'm hoping to open source the project soon. If anyone would like to know more give me a shout (@andrewdavey).

andrewdavey··on The Death of the Scrollbar
Just tap the very top of the screen. That takes you back to the top.

This of course shows the problem with gesture based UI in general: lack of discoverability.

andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I'm not capturing canvas content yet. It should be possible - but I'll need to look into it.

SVG content appears in the DOM so should be captured.

andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I hadn't see that site before - I'll have a look into it. Thanks!
andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I can certainly look at offering a privately-hostable version eventually. It's running on a typical asp.net stack, so shouldn't be too hard to install elsewhere.

I'm currently focused on getting the public service out there, but if you're keen to get Jooplicate running locally please drop me an email andrew@equin.co.uk . It would be useful to know what kind of requirements you have.

Thanks.

andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I can see privacy being a issue. I think at least I will need to add a message to the form to inform the user. Having a checkbox to enable/disable the snapshot may be a useful option too. So then the user can still send a message, but without the snapshot.
andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
Yes, scripts are removed.

I will need to have a closer look at the canvas API and see what actually works across different browsers. It could well be a simpler way to generate images - even if IE6/7/8 will miss out.

Thanks.

andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I'm trying to keep things simple for this initial version and iterate based on feedback. Jooplicate is doing some tricky stuff in the background. For example, it's working cross-domain and sanitizing the HTML.
andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
Yes, for now it's HTML, which is better than nothing. My plan for the future is to pass the HTML to a server-side browser renderer (using the user agent captured in the snapshot). So then you'll get a JPEG as well.
andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
Thank you for the feedback. I'm glad you like the site. I'll chat with my designer about alternative header designers. Drawing much more attention to the demo is a great idea. I'll see what I can do :)
andrewdavey··on I'm seeking beta-testers for my user support snapshot service
I'm the developer behind Jooplicate. If you have any questions please let me know. Thanks!
andrewdavey··on Jooplicate: see your web application exactly as your users see it
Someone just told me they're still seeing the unfinished holding page. I assume the DNS update is lagging behind. You can access the new page here instead: http://jooplicate.capturely.com/
andrewdavey··on Show HN: Review Vogue, my web dev tool that uses nodejs and socket.io
Thanks for the follow up. My girlfriend has kindly offered her design skills, so I hope she can make something much nicer soon :)

I'm glad the tool works - let me know if you have any ideas for it.

andrewdavey··on Show HN: Review Vogue, my web dev tool that uses nodejs and socket.io
Thank you for the feedback. The colors look fine to me (in all the browsers I've tried). What OS & browser are you using? I'm not sure what you mean by "strifes"; stripes perhaps? Why would making the colored stripes the same height be better? Have I misunderstood?
andrewdavey··on Vogue auto-reloads stylesheets whenever CSS files are saved
You're very welcome :) If you have any feedback and ideas for improvements, let me know.
andrewdavey··on Vogue auto-reloads stylesheets whenever CSS files are saved
I created this project in about a day, using Node and web sockets (via socket.io). I'm really impressed with how simple Node is to work with and npm is very handy too! I'd love to get some feedback - thanks.
andrewdavey··on AppHarbor - Heroku-style hosting for asp.net
It's not my app. I'm just came across AppHarbor yesterday and have been playing with it. The home page is very bare, so I linked to the blog to provide quicker access to info. I guess the guys have been too busy to get the home page ready yet.

I'm sorry if I've damaged the marketing opportunities. I was just excited to see them handing out beta invites and wanted to spread the word :)

andrewdavey··on AppHarbor - Heroku-style hosting for asp.net
I'm currently stuck on a mix of shared hosting and VPS with my asp.net apps. I'm really keen to move to something simpler that also fits with my git-workflow. AppHarbor looks very promising and much simpler than Azure (hopefully cheaper too!)
andrewdavey··on AppHarbor - Heroku-style hosting for asp.net
I happen to like writing web apps using .NET. I came across AppHarbor yesterday, got a beta invite and started playing with it today. Yes it's very early, but I thought there might be people here who would find it interesting still.
andrewdavey··on Knockout.js v1.1 - dynamic, declarative UI made easier
Check out the main project site here: http://knockoutjs.com/
andrewdavey··on Windows Phone 7 in-depth preview
I get the impression it will look and feel even better in person, rather than on video.
andrewdavey··on I Smell Smoke - Rob Conery on Microsoft
You can try to stream the video from here: http://streaming.ndc2010.no/tcs/ The server seems to be overloaded right now though.

There is a torrent of 33 talks from NDC2010: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/757631/NDC2010/NDC2010%20Part1.torre... Rob's talk is in there.

andrewdavey··on Get Ready For C# 4.0
I find it easier to remember the difference between "out" and "in", compared to "covariant" and "contravariant".
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