Recent Posts
Sentiment Sweep
By Alicia Sykes, on Thursday 20th October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Recently I developed and published an opensource web app that uses data from Twitter combined with sentiment analysis and emotion detection to create a series of data visualisations to illustrate the happy and less happy locations, topics and times. ....
Hack Zurich 2016
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Europes biggest 40 hour non-stop hacking marathon, HackZurich 2016 had 800+ Attendees from around the globe, 500+ hackers, hundreds of submissions, and 3. 6 tons of food. Big name sponsors (including Google, Kyak, Adobe, Samsung, Bosch, Microsoft and loads way more) ensured that event was an awesome one. ....
StartHack Switzerland 2016
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)On the 11th - 13th of March 2016, 200 hackers from around the world descended on St Gallen, Switzerland, for the second addition of StartHack. Sponsored by SwissCom and run as part of the START summit 2016, this 36 hour coding competition had plenty to offer. ....
Unit Testing and why it should be used
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 11th October 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)What is Unit Testing?Unit testing is where the program is broken down into a series of units, or functions, or areas - each of these is tested individually/standalone in a lot of detail. This allows us to check that each function works as it should. ....
Coverage testing in Node.js with Istanbul
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 4th October 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)What is Coverage Testing?Coverage testing determines what proportion of your source code is covered by your tests. It's useful to be able to check this as your developing/writing tests/testing so that you can aim as close as possible for 100%How do I use Coverage Testing in my Node. ....
Setting up a unit testing environment in Node.js
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 27th September 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)Example Projecthttps://github. com/Lissy93/quick-example-of-testing-in-nodejsIntroductionIn this post we'll go through the complete process of setting up your test environment in a Node. js app, and then write a few simple unit tests. Although I've aimed this for Node apps, you should be able to follow these steps for any JavaScript setup such as Ionic. ....
Introduction to Test Driven Development
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 20th September 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)First off, what do tests provide us with?Documentation codeCatch future errorsLong-term time savings - because errors have been found before anythings been deployed to productionAlthough all the above are true, using tests like this is just a tool - not a process. ....
How to write a gulpfile
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 13th September 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)Setting up a new project and getting it ready for GulpGulp is simple to set up. Presuming you have Node. js already installed:In the command line, navigate into the root of your project working directoryInstall Gulp with npm install gulp --save-dev what this will do will add gulp into your node_modules folder. ....
Introduction to automating your tasks with the gulp.js build tool
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 6th September 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)What is Gulp?Gulp. js is a streaming build system built on Node. js. This basically means that it can be configured to perform repetitive tasks and coding operations automatically during development. For example it can compile all your coffee script whenever your file changes, or it can minify your CSS, or maybe synchronize all your development browsers and constantly refresh them on file change. ....
Smart Depart App - AngelHack 2015 - HP Prize Winner
By Alicia Sykes, on Monday 22nd June 2015. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Smart Depart is an app which monitors your predefined route into work, and will wake you up earlier if there are delays, ensuring your never late for meetings. Currently it is integrated with TFL, but we plan to start integrating it with National Rail, traffic and weather data too. ....
Polymer and Moder Web API's
By Alicia Sykes, on Wednesday 24th June 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)Polymer is part of the web platform team, and it officially began 3 years ago - but last week Google announced that 1. 0 has been released, and ready for production. Previously building web apps across multiple platforms and form factors was really challenging, different components are not always designed to work together - the answer to this is web components. ....
@suggest_movies Friction free social movie recommendations
By Alicia Sykes, on Monday 22nd June 2015. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Send a tweet to @suggest_movies and receive a personalized movie recommendation back. @suggest_movies will analyse your public tweets from your Twitter profile and use personality insights powered by IBM Watson to create a profile of your character and determine what movie genre's you'd be interested in. ....
Chilton 100
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 5th June 2015. Categorised in Sports. (Read on Blogger)The Chilton 100 was a 122km /177km sportive in the Chilton Hillshttp://humanrace. co. uk/events/cycling/chiltern-100-sportive. ....
Google IO - What's new in Android
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 7th June 2015. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)At Google IO 2015 some exciting new announcements were made about new features in the Android operating system for developers. Developers can now build apps for Android M by downloading the developer preview (API 22) and latest SDK. There will be a couple of versions of previews which will be improved before the final version is released. ....
Introduction to react.js
By Alicia Sykes, on Monday 25th May 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)React is a JavaScript framework built at Facebook, it was built to answer the question "How should we structure JavaScript applications". There are a lot of JavaScript frameworks that try to answer this question, most of them are MVC based (or MVVM or MVW) - basically they're all based around models - which are just observable objects that have some events api that allows you to subscribe to some changes on that object. ....
How to create a web service to send emails for you Android, iOS or web application
By Alicia Sykes, on Monday 25th May 2015. Categorised in web-dev. (Read on Blogger)Since it's a common task to have to send emails from your app, this post outlines the quickest way to get a mail service up and running using server side JavaScript, Parse and Mandrill. No JavaScript or web coding experience is needed. Set up Parse1. ....
Vitality Run Hackney 2015 (21km)
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 17th May 2015. Categorised in Sports. (Read on Blogger)A fast and flat half marathon through Hackney (East London), with 13,000 runners and a route including the Olympic park, Hackeny Empire and some of the green spaces of Hackeny marshes and Victoria park. . ....
Digital Bucket - Charity Donation Collection App
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)During the weekend of BattleHack I worked in a team developing a Digital Bucket Solution, a simple application that allows people to donate to charity bucket collectors even when they don't have any loose change, using their smart phone. The backend was written in Node js and has an iOS client. ....
Built my first PC!
By Alicia Sykes, on Tuesday 5th May 2015. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)I have finished building my computer!!!!Christopher's got the AMD FX-8350 8 core 4 GHz processor, 16 GB of DDR3 1866MHz RAM, 2TB HDD and 240GB SSD, 2GB graphics card ( the Asus AMD Radeon R7 250X) and the Asus M5A97 EVO R2. 0 MB and LED lights because LED lights are COOL!!!Finished building my PC! pic. ....
Learn HTML5 in 40 minutes tutorial
By Alicia Sykes, on Sunday 3rd May 2015. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Since EVERYTHING front-end related on the web is coded in HTML and HTML5 has a bunch of new features to make your web content more interactive and semantic, it is the language you need to know before you can do anything else web-related. These videos should give you an overview of what HTML5 is and how you can use it to create web pages. ....
BattleHack London 2015 @ Tobacco Docks
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)My team BattleHack 2015 was the biggest London BattleHack so far, held at the Tobacco Docks. Was a great weekend, my only disappointment was that I did not win an axe :(SwagStickersCaffiineThe winners. ....
Apps World 2014
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Apps World 2014 in London was great this year, with over 1,600 attendees it was held at the ExCel, and had loads of good speakers and sponsors. My favourite talks from day 2 were: first a talk titled responsive website or native app which was given by Geoff Parkhurst who's the CTO of Lovehoney, he weighed up the advantages and disadvantages of each side very nicely. ....
Study Time - Developed app to reduce distractions while studying
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)IntroductionStudy Time is an open source Android application to reduce distractions while studying. Any student will know that mobile phones are a massive distraction to studying, but also have some utilities that help you get your work done, such as calculator or Wikipedia. ....
Droidcon Conference London 2014
By Alicia Sykes, on Friday 21st October 2016. Categorised in Computers. (Read on Blogger)Droidcon London is a 2-day Android conference organised by Skills Matter. The first day was a community-led barcamp and democamp with talks and discussions given by opensource Android developers. The second day was packed full of presentations given by the worlds leading Android experts, on a range of Android topics. ....
Vitality Oxford Half Marathon 2014
By Alicia Sykes, on Tuesday 21st October 2014. Categorised in Sports. (Read on Blogger)The Oxford half marathon is a 13. 1 mile flat run though Oxford city, including Iffley Road, Cowely, the Mini Plant, the River Thames + Canal Path and this year the Iffley running track and a "Banister Mile" which was separately timed. the startA not so great photo of me coming into the finishMap of the route, tracked using RuntasticI tracked my run (as always) with Runtastic, by far my favourite sports tracking app. ....
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Recent Projects
Sentiment Sweep
Sentiment analysis on real-time Twitter data, either by loactaion or topic, and visually displayed with a servies of dynamic D3.js charts
Hasami Shogi
2-player iPhone remake of the traditional Japanese board game, Hasami Shogi. Written in Swift.
Coding Tutorials
Digital Services
Freelance development, offering a range of digital services to small businesses, individuals and social enterprises.
- Software and digital tools
- Quality web hosting
- Bespoke web apps and sites
- Custom Android, iOS or hybrid app development
- Pro-bono projects for charities, Churches and social enterprises
About
Hey! I'm Alicia, a software engineer based in London, UK.
I love all-things-code, and my favourite pastime is developing open source applications.
I'm always looking for new technologies to learn, and to find better ways of developing.
This blog is a collection of articles about new tech, specific tutorials, event and product reviews
as well as a few posts on random topics and things I've been up to.
When I'm not coding, I enjoy sports, socialising, chilling and thinking about code!
I am a Christian, and a lot of the work I do is done with Jesus in mind.
I am always happy to work for free or cost price on charitable or Christian projects.
All posts are my own views, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer(s)
This blog is not regularly updated.
Since not much in my life is particularly interesting (lol), the blog is mainly
used for articles about coding and tech, as well as a few tutorials and reviews.
