Ross Wintle

It was a huge privilege to speak at WordCamp London last weekend, introducing programming principles to beginner coders, and reminding some more experienced folks of some things that might trip you up. I got some great feedback, and people even laughed at my "jokes"! Talks were live-streamed and you can see a recording of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcibNG6gUjE&feature=youtu.be&t=3596

This is a historical note, really.

In May and June 2017, Sainsburys Supermarket teamed up with Lego to create a card-trading/collecting thing called "Create the World". It was a brilliant tie in and for about 6 weeks, anyone with a young person who shopped there would be talking about it, and cards were traded in playgrounds across the country.

I saw loads of people arranging swapsies by posting what they had on Facebook and thought: "There must be a better way!"

I was learning Laravel at th... Read more

As I've been increasing my Laravel knowledge, I've been keen to share it with others too.

As I hang out with quite a lot of WordPress developers, many of whom I think could benefit from understanding Laravel more deeply, I put together a free video "course" that works as an introduction to Laravel for WordPress developers.

I've recently been using my "Press Ups" screencasts for web-related, but non-WordPress topics, so here's a couple of videos:

1) Online security: Generating and using passwords with password managers

http://press-ups.com/2017/09/online-security-generating-using-passwords-password-managers/

2) A quick introduction to HTTPS

http://press-ups.com/2017/10/quick-introduction-https/

As I've continued to learn Laravel, I've continued to find opportunities to create small web applications as coding practice. So I've recently made:

1) swaptheworld.uk - a simple trading card "swapsies" site for the hugely popular "Create the World" Lego cards that Sainsburys put out.
2) screentime.wintle.org - a simple screen-time tracking application that makes use of Vue.js, Vue resource and some clever CSS
3) today-i.com - a simple site that prompts and inspires daily creativity and encoura... Read more

After working on several websites recently that lacked simple security and data protection measures, I sent out a series of Tweets across the course of a day with some simple, but essential, security and data protection tips.

These were all collated in the following Twitter "moment": https://twitter.com/i/moments/851864317104467970

In late March I gave a talk at WordCamp London on "Why and how to use screencasts to train users". It was well attended and I got good feedback. Video will be available soon.

https://2017.london.wordcamp.org/session/why-and-how-to-use-screencasts-to-train-users/

I've been attending the Bristol WordPress Meetup and there have been a couple of questions that ave come up that I wanted to answer in depth, so I've been putting together some developer screencasts that go in depth into some WordPress related topics. Here's a post about them with links to the screencasts.

https://rosswintle.uk/2016/12/wordpress-technical-developer-screencasts/

I've been learning JavaScript in more depth lately. Here's a blog post about it with some details of some of the things that I've read in depth.

https://rosswintle.uk/2017/01/re-learning-to-learn-to-code-javascript-foibles/

On 23rd and 24th July I attended and spoke at the inaugural WordCamp Brighton and took part in the related contributor day.

My talk was a ten minute lightning talk on creativity entitled "You are creative". You can see it on video here: http://wordpress.tv/2016/08/09/ross-wintle-you-are-creative/ The talk was well received and got some good feedback, and I enjoyed delivering it too.

The WordCamp was great - a good chance to meet faces old and new. The contributor day was excellent. It was gr... Read more

I attended WebDevConf in Bristol on October 7th. I found it really good as a means of stimulating creativity and gaining some useful technical knowledge. Harry Roberts's talk on Refactoring CSS was particularly good from a technical point of view: https://speakerdeck.com/csswizardry/refactoring-css-without-losing-your-mind

Great to meet some new people and bump into some old contacts.

After the EU referendum, a petition on the Government petitions site went crazy (see https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/131215).

I was intrigued at the seemingly constant rate of increase in signatures on this petition. The JSON data was available under an open license so I decided to track it.

This was an excuse to build a really simple Laravel app as a refresher, but one that would make use of queues and jobs, a JS charting library, and a HTTP library that I'd not used before.

The ... Read more

Hadn't heard of CSS snap points until today. This article explains, and provides a polyfill too. Really useful up-coming technique for carousels.

On 10th April I spoke at WordCamp London on the topic of "User experience: It's for everyone", and I was later invited to repeat the talk at the Bristol WordPress meetup. The video of this talk is now online.