• Fitness Goals and My Running History

    Sep 14, 2025

    I want to blog about running, but having never mentioned it on here I feel like I should give some history, so let’s go back in time….

    Back in 2008 my old boss Steve Frater mentioned to me that he was planning to run a 10k race near me and would I like to join him.

    I’ve just entered the Liverpool 10K on Oct 5th - that gives you plenty of time to train so how about it?

    I laughed at him and said that I don’t run, I cycle, but for some reason I did start considering it and ultimately did sign up. (Looks like his original suggestion was in April and I didn’t sign up until August the 1st!) I must have caught the bug as I ended up agreeing to do a 5k race two weeks before this too.

    Over the years I did keep running but I didn’t really get into a regular pace, sometimes I’d run with friends, sometimes not. I did the Santa Dash and a few other races, including the Tunnel 10k Run through the Mersey Tunnel, but at times I would still get out of the habit and would stop for a long while. I remember once even doing the Couch to 5k plan even though I would have considered myself a runner, just because it had been a while since I’d last run.

    I would mostly run distances around 5-10k, and at that time I remember thinking 10k was a long run, not really a training distance but a race only distance. I didn’t have any plans to go beyond, I suppose I still didn’t think of myself as a serious runner. One day when running with friends we did two laps of Sefton Park – it’s about a 4k loop – and I said to my friend “do you ever do three laps?” I seem to remember her saying no, but then somehow the conversation got onto whether I’d be doing the Liverpool Half Marathon. Again I scoffed, a distance with “marathon” in the title?! No chance! Again it must have sat in my mind as a “why not?” as ultimately I did start looking at training plans and made a start on training.

    The plan I used was from Runners Connect, it was a decent plan that took you from being an occasional runner to completing the distance. It involved running the full distance once in training and I still remember the moment I finished that run and feeling a great sense of achievement. The training plan must have worked wonders as I completed my first attempt at a half marathon race in 1:40:00 (exactly!) A time, in fact, that I’ve never managed to beat (and 12 years on probably never will!)

    I actually ran the same event the following year (1:43:something if I recall) and did continue to run and do a few other races over the years that followed. I also started working for a company with lots of other runners, we were all remote so only ran together every 3 months, but it was good to have people I could discuss running with and have a sense of camaraderie. I never really had any aim for my running though and so would easily fall into periods when I didn’t run very much. It was after one of these periods when I saw a tweet from a friend; she was running regularly and would always post a photo of herself at the end of the run smiling despite the difficulties she encountered. On the 1st January 2020, inspired by one of her runs, having not run much for a while and barely above 5k I decided that I should do the 14-15km loop around the parks of South Liverpool that my friend Hakim came up with. I really enjoyed myself and made the decision to start running regularly again.

    John McKerrell during a run, his head and shoulders are in the foreground wearing a "day glo" green coat, behind is a dual carriageway and bare trees suggesting a winter's day

    Over the next month I started (probably during runs) coming up with a list of Goals, things that I wanted to achieve with my running. I also thought it would be a good idea to put them somewhere public to keep me accountable. For want of a better place I put them on GitHub as a Gist, but that turned out to be a good idea as it has meant that I have a full history of all the changes I made. You can of course still see the original list there but I’ll copy it here:

    Running Goals

## 2020
1. Run a half marathon
2. Run a 5k race
3. Run for more than 2 hours
4. Run for longer than a half marathon
5. Run 500km in the year

## Beyond
* Run a marathon
* Run longer than a marathon
* Run a trail race
* Run a 5k in less than 20 minutes

    For someone who had run a maximum of a half marathon, and hadn’t done that for 6 years, I’d say that was quite a reasonable set of goals and would keep me going for a while. As it turned out I managed a half marathon distance within a few weeks and also hit the “more than 2 hours” and “longer than a half marathon” (just barely!) Some re-evaluation was needed!

    Looking at my initial edits I decided to add a smaller distance goal, to at least run further than I did in 2019. I also added goals to run a half marathon race and also a 5k race. I added some goals about “decently longer” than a half marathon too but put them in the “Beyond” section.

    I managed to complete the half marathon race goal just days before the UK was put into lockdown for the COVID-19 pandemic. As that year progressed I found myself slightly jealous of all the (mostly childless!) people taking on new hobbies and getting into exercise. I mean, I made the decision to get back into running before lockdown! I have to admit that lockdown probably did give me the opportunity to spend more time running, especially as there was no activities to take the children to. I managed to get through a few more goals and developed the list a little more, with the year ending as follows:

    ## 2020
1. ✅ Run further than I did in 2019 (153km)
2. ✅ Run a half marathon distance
3. ✅ Run a half marathon race
4. Run a 5k race
5. ✅ Run for more than 2 hours
6. ✅ Run for longer than a half marathon
7. ✅ Run 500km in the year
8. ✅ Run 1000km in the year
9. ✅ Run a 5k in less than 20 minutes
10. ✅ Run something decently beyond a half marathon rather than just a little bit
11. ✅ Run something decently beyond 2 hours rather than just a little bit
12. ✅ Run marathon distance

    So not only did I do something decently longer than a half marathon, I actually managed to complete a marathon distance, on the last day of the year! To be honest I’d probably say that was an overly long list of goals, but you can see how I started relatively small and went on from there.

    Now I feel like this blog post is getting quite long (and I’ve been tweaking it for 9 months!), so having taken you through my running background, I’ll pause here and in a future blog post will talk about how I’ve used the goals and how things have progressed over the last 5 years.

  • Starting a running log

    Mar 20, 2021

    I was listening to a podcast recently that suggested that everyone (who runs) should keep a running log, to keep more than just the details of a run like the distance and time but also how you feel on the run and what you were thinking about while you were out. I thought I’d give it a go.

    I started writing this post a long time ago, it’s now 29th December 2024! It seems that while I didn’t do anything with my blog I have been writing regular notes for my runs since around March 2021, i.e. when I started writing this post. I don’t write much, just a little around any problems, aches or pains that I had. It’s probably useful really just because it puts my mind at ease, as even if I don’t feel 100% on one run it generally doesn’t last.

    Not going to extend this specific post much now but I do hope to write more about my running in the near future (so going by the current cadence, 2027?)

    The podcast I was listening to is from Runners Connect,

  • MING and the Kindle

    Nov 2, 2019

    I’ve recently been playing with a set of technologies that are becoming known as the MING stack which consists of:

    • MQTT - A pub-sub message queue/protocol
    • Influx DB - A time series database
    • Node-RED - A GUI tool for doing event driven programming in a web browser
    • Grafana - A graphing dashboard tool

    We’ve had these set up for a while in DoES Liverpool to monitor the power use of the space and of some individual devices. Julian set up a device that watches the flashes from the electricity meter and publishes messages via the Wi-Fi to an MQTT broker. Node-Red picks up on these and pushes them into an InfluxDB database. Grafana then reads the values from the databases and publishes them in graphs. We’ve also got a variety of Sonoff devices around the space that can measure the power usage of the things they’re plugged into, or turn those things off and on.

    The above image shows the overall power use of the space with some individual items super-imposed, also the usage of the coffee machine. There’s also a graph showing eight separate temperatures across Room 29.

    In March of this year I had solar panels and a battery installed at my home. We have an 8kW solar system and a 4.4kWh battery. These did really well over the summer and the Moixa battery system we have does give us some good graphs and data about our usage, but this is all in a cloud system and doesn’t give me much access to the data. I wanted to take control of this a bit more, so seeing the MING setup work so well in DoES Liverpool it was obvious that I needed something similar at home.

    Getting things set up was a bit fiddly, in the end I found that Node-RED actually offers a script for getting Node, NPM and Node-RED properly setup on a Pi.. I think I also followed the instructions on this page to install InfluxDB but then it seems like I just used the Grafana that is available in Raspbian, so installing that would be as simple as:

    Actually I used the official instructions for influxdb, I think first time around I downloaded a deb for grafana but now I’ve switched to using their apt repo

    apt-get install grafana

    Because our solar was installed a few months before our battery went in we were given a little Owl Intuition box that monitored our solar output and reported it on a web page. I noticed that it had some UDP settings and after some investigation found that it actually broadcasts its data on the internal network on a UDP port. This was really easy to use with Node-RED

    I started writing this post a /long/ time ago. Today is 28th December 2024 so five years have passed. I’m now using PostgreSQL for the database as I had problems storing all my data in InfluxDB on a 32bit Raspberry Pi install. It’s definitely slower but has now got data for 3 years in. Apart from that the setup is somewhat the same. Apologies for not actually filling all the details in above but I’m sure it’s easy enough to find instructions on the internet now, or just ask an LLM!

  • Ethan's Name Plate

    May 9, 2018

    My daughter Evie was given a very nice thing soon after she was born - her name cut out of a piece of wood. My son Ethan however wasn’t bought such a thing and I decided that I should try to make something along the same lines. The idea developed into making a nameplate for his bedroom and after thinking about it for a little while I came up with an idea.

    The laser cutter is still my favourite thing in the DoES Liverpool workshop, and the thing that I’m most capable of using, but it does have its limitations. It only produces flat things, it can only cut thicknesses of maybe 3-6mm, and it really produces things in only 1 or 2 colours (the colour of the material and whatever colour it turns out if you engrave).

    I don’t entirely remember where the idea came from but I decided that I’d like to try layering multiple materials on top of each other to allow me to introduce more colours. I also came up with the idea of a forest scene. Part of the idea behind this was to give me the option of mixing wood and acrylic together in the piece. I decided on a night time scene as that feels like the most interesting time to be in a forest, with a full moon beaming down and some of the nocturnal creatures coming out.

    I don’t really think of myself as a very artistic person but I did want to avoid simply pulling together clip art so I decided that I really had to create all the elements that I was going to use by myself. As I work most of the week and do childcare most of the other times I really just had short snippets of time to work on the project during the evenings. I find this can actually work quite well sometimes as it forces me to think about things more rather than just diving in and rushing things. Although it can be a little frustrating when a few days goes past and all you’ve done is draw a few branches!

    For the night sky I decided to try a few things that might make it more interesting. Laminated acrylic is a thin plastic material that is made by layering two colours of material together. One of the layers is particularly thin and is ideal for engraving. Generally when you engrave acrylic on a laser the result is actually really subtle. Whereas with plywood where you go from a quite light brown to a much darker brown, acrylic doesn’t really change colour, rather it’s more the shadow caused by the indent that you see. With the laminated acrylic you can get a much more noticeable difference as the thinner layer gets engraved away showing a completely different colour underneath. Looking at the colours of laminated acrylic available there was a nice black on white option that would really work well for a night sky as I could engrave away the black to reveal stars and the moon.

    Going for realism I also decided that I should really make my moon more than just a big white circle. Fortunately just a few weeks earlier there had been a super moon and lots of people, me included, had taken photos of it. I used one of the pictures I had taken and applied the “Posterise” filter in the Gnu Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) to reduce it to just a few colours. I then used Inkscape’s “Trace Bitmap” feature to convert this into vectors suitable for the laser cutter. Even with the laminated plastic you still only really get 2 colour options but I decided to try engraving the material twice, so that I engraved the black to reveal white underneath, and then on top of that white did some further engraving to add texture to my moon. The effect actually came out really well, I was very happy with the result.

    NASA release most (all?) of their imagery under a public domain license so there’s a few more little items of interest that I added but will leave them to be found rather than describing them here.

    The sky layer was quite simple to do structurally as it simply consisted of a rounded box with the moon and some stars engraved on top. When it came to the other layers I was going to have to start cutting elements out, allowing the layers below to show through, but I needed to do this while making sure the whole piece was structurally sound and that pieces wouldn’t either fall through following the laser cutting, or break off easily. Fortunately even in a forest you’re going to get some overlap so I just needed to make sure that my trees overlapped enough to touch the sides and each other, whilst leaving enough space to see the sky below. I was intending to build the trees up from two layers, one for the branches and another for the foliage but again I wanted to make sure I left enough gaps in the foliage so that you could actually see and appreciate the tree trunks I’d put so much time into designing. I did this by mixing some conifer trees with some deciduous which gave me good opportunities to show the trunks. I do like the idea of having hidden elements which, even though they won’t necessarily be seen, I have still put some care and attention into having them look at their best.

    The foliage for a conifer tree is fairly simple to do, if you can imagine a child’s drawing of a Christmas tree you can imagine my artistic prowess! I wanted to add some texture to these too rather than having a plain green layer so I added some zig-zag shapes to further suggest foliage. My first attempt at doing this was to draw these shapes as lines which I cut on the laser at high speed and low power so that the line was simply engraved, but I found this gave a much narrower line than I wanted and didn’t look particularly good, so to get the best result I increased the stroke width of my lines in Inkscape then used the “Stroke to Path” menu option to turn this into a polygon that could be engraved properly. The foliage layer was again a little tricky as I had to make sure that the tree touched the frame enough that they wouldn’t break. I had to balance this with allowing enough space so that the layers below would show through. Fortunately in the final product this layer would be sandwiched by other layers and as this isn’t intended as a toy there shouldn’t be too much risk of breakage.

    As I’ve said this method of working was limiting my colour options. I was intending to use plywood for the branches of the trees and green perspex for the foliage so I decided to add some woodland creatures to the tree branch layer so that I could reuse the brown for fur, as it happens they’re mostly blocked out by the other layers but there’s definitely a little crudely drawn squirrel peeping out.

    The final layer was of course the text layer. Again I decided to use plywood for this layer. I didn’t want to overcomplicate things and it felt like interchanging plywood and acrylic for every other layer would give a nice effect. It actually took me quite a long time to find just the right font. I had some idea in mind of swirly lettering but couldn’t quite work out what I wanted, I forget what search terms I was using but I think I was looking for something vaguely Celtic. In the end I found Ober Tuerkheim which gives a great effect. Again I had to work to make sure that the letters would be properly attached to the frame and wouldn’t be likely to break.

    As you can see the first and last letters overlapped the frame, and the “h” was large enough to overlap the frame at the bottom, even breaking the fourth wall. To solve the issue of the other letters I ended up connecting them with small tabs. I can’t quite remember where I got the shapes for the tabs, quite possibly it was a hyphen or other shape from the font, I then moved it around and rotated it to look just right. I didn’t particularly want the tabs to be a feature of the design though so I ended up removing the ends of them. This was actually a fairly simple though time consuming process which I had used multiple times in the project to deal with overlaps, e.g the overlapping branches of the tree. Whenever I had an overlap I would want to only cut the outside of the shapes, and then etch a line to show the overlapping part. Here’s a breakdown of how this worked for the letters

    • Letter and tab
    • Duplicate both paths and use the intersection tool (I’ve shifted it over and made it red so you can see it)
    • Now union the original elements to get the cut path
    • Moving the piece that we broke out using intersection into place
    • Here you can see the nodes of the intersected piece
    • In this case I don’t actually want the tab to be visible so I remove all segments apart from the one that made up the edge of the letter E
    • And here is the finished product

    Such a convoluted process really just to get that little line but it really does give a good effect when used throughout. I used a very similar process for overlapping branches as mentioned but here I would end up with little squares making up the intersected part and I’d need to remove opposite edges to show a single branch overlapping the other branch.

    Anyway, enough about process and techniques, I’m sure you’ve been waiting to see the finished article, so here it is:

    I stained the tree branch layer and used danish oil to finish the letters layer so even though they were both made with Birch ply I still got to differentiate their colours. All-in-all I was really happy with how it came out. Ethan seemed to like it too!

  • Year Notes: 2016

    Jan 17, 2018

    So 2016 started quite similarly to 2014 with a new baby in the house. I was fortunate enough that when agreeing to take the job at Axon Vibe I’d had the foresight to request that, in the event that we had another baby, I’d be able to take a 3 month extended parental leave (unpaid). I was so glad I’d done that as it meant I could be much more involved in Ethan’s early days and also give Evie some much needed attention too.

    Although I’d been freelance when we’d had Evie, so in theory was more in control of my time, I was also more worried about what money was coming in. Although my extended leave was unpaid I did have the security of knowing I had a well-paid job to go back to. I’m definitely a supporter of extended parental leave, ideally paid, and was able to put this into practice when DoES Liverpool’s admin guy, Seán, had a child last year. We agreed to give him a month’s paid leave rather than the statutory minimum. Obviously as he’s a part-time worker the cost was less to DoES than it might have been for a full-time person, and a month is still a lot less than we would have to give for maternity leave but I did want to make sure we did more than the minimum and was glad that the other directors of DoES agreed.

    Looking back it seems like DoES Liverpool’s search for a new home began in earnest around March 2016. We looked at a few places around Bold Street and the Ropewalks, found a reasonable candidate on Victoria Street but then found what we thought could be a great option near the Ship & Mitre pub off Dale Street. It was actually quite a large building, at 8000 square foot over 4 floors, but we were hoping that we might sublet out reasonably large portions of it to other businesses. We took the community on a series of visits and spent some time working out whether we would be able to afford it, but in the end the owners decided to rent it to a charity that they were involved with so it slipped out of our grasp. Following this we got a little jaded and as far as I can recall didn’t really do much more searching until 2017.

    I took Evie to MakeFest in the Central Library in Liverpool in June. It was nice to have a day out just her and me and she seemed to find it interesting, though was a bit nervous of some of the costumes from the Comic Con attendees who were wandering around! Makefest is a great showcase of “making” in Liverpool and beyond and has lots of interesting workshops. They’re actually planning for this year’s event so if you’re interested in exhibiting you should definitely sign up. (ahaha! yeah I started writing this in January 2018 so we’ve had two Makefest’s since)

    Jumping to the end of the year we finally come across one of the projects that I wanted to blog about, that triggered me starting on the whole “Year Notes” process! I laser cut some Christmas presents for the kids. It was quite a labour of love taking quite a while to prepare for (given I could only really work on it for minutes each evening) but I was very pleased with how they turned out… for more detail on that see this follow up blog post.

  • Year Notes: 2015

    Nov 3, 2017

    Last year’s notes ended with a cliff hanger, would I take a permanent job at Axon Vibe or would I not? Well the year began straight away with a visit to head office. Flying out to Lucerne in Switzerland on the fifth of January. This was actually my wife’s first day back in work after being off for over a year’s maternity leave. It was unfortunate to have to leave her to sort out our daughter during her first week but I did at least get a later flight so that I could help get Evie to her first morning in nursery.

    View from the office terrace

    After much consideration I ultimately decided to take the job at Axon Vibe. I was intending to continue working for them so it’s not like I was looking for other clients, and the money was such that I wasn’t losing out by being a salaried worker. By this point I’d already agreed that I would have my daughter on Friday afternoons so I ultimately decide to work Monday - Thursday but to keep Friday for myself. That would allow me to keep working on my own apps or even doing small amounts of client work on Friday mornings. The view from the terrace (see above) certainly didn’t hurt either!

    I wasn’t going to mention too much about what we did at Axon Vibe that year as very little of what we did then has survived. We took some time to work out what our key offering would be, sometimes focussing on business to business applications, and at others trying to develop public facing apps. One interesting thing was that we took on a number of developers and a designer who all worked from DoES Liverpool. By the end of the year we actually had 4 people all working from Liverpool. That was great to see, even if I did find it a little strange sharing an office with colleagues! We also enjoyed a great week in October when we managed to persuade colleagues from Cirencester, Norwich and Edinburgh to visit while we worked on new developments.

    Way back in 2011 I’d actually taken over the running of a monthly event that would have geeks meeting up in a local bar on the last Tuesday of the month either just for a social meet-up or to hear someone talking about some technology or, well, anything that happened to interest them. GeekUp was a venerable event that started way back in December 2005 in Manchester. Over time the event became more popular and drew in people from surrounding towns, Liverpool included. I attended my first event in March 2007, gave a talk on OpenStreetMap at the following event and then was glad to attend the inaugural event in Liverpool later that month.

    Running for so many years, GeekUp was such a great way for similarly minded folks in Liverpool to connect. Most of my friendships in Liverpool can be traced back to GeekUp, especially if you consider that I would never have co-founded DoES Liverpool if I hadn’t met Adrian McEwen there. While I enjoyed attending GeekUp I found I wasn’t the best at running it. It was easier when we met in a bar as if there was no talk you could easily just chat and have a drink. It’s amazing how a simple schedule of “last Tuesday of the month” and perhaps the odd “Are you going to GeekUp?” on twitter would keep the event going quite well. GeekUp ran for four years meeting in 3345 (now “The Attic”) on Parr Street. On one of the last meetings there we found the room had been double booked (I’m sure with UKIP!) and it turned out we no longer had the booking at all. As we were in the process of setting up DoES Liverpool, and we were planning to host events there, we had a single meeting in Leaf on Bold Street, before moving the event to DoES.

    This change really affected the dynamic of the event, it was more difficult to get into the space and when you arrived you found a bland room of desks so it was quite different to meeting in a bar. We actually managed to continue for four more years but I struggled to get around to finding people to talk. Then in 2014 when I did manage to arrange and promote in advance a great line-up of speakers, I struggled to attract an audience! In the end I decided that life was complicated enough without the monthly stress of finding a speaker so 2015 was the year I brought the whole thing to an end. Although I don’t really get time to go out so much these days it does seem like Liverpool is missing a general geeky social meet like this now so it’s a shame there is no GeekUp, but there’s nothing saying someone couldn’t take it on again in the future!

    I continued with my running this year too. Living just 4km away from DoES Liverpool it’s actually an easy and fairly short run to get into the office and I’ve tried at times to make it my primary way of commuting. I haven’t managed it often but have a few times managed to run there and back for the four days I would be in the office. No Half Marathon this year but I signed up for the Spring 10K around Sefton Park and managed to beat my personal best of around 46 minutes, I wasn’t too confident as I hadn’t done much speed training but was very happy when I blew almost 3 minutes off my record!

    I tried to take up gardening as a hobby to brighten the place up. I even planted potatoes so that we’d get greenery and useful, tasty potatoes. Though at times the potatoes seemed like they were trying to take over the DoES Liverpool meeting room we didn’t really have a very prosperous harvest and it felt like the time and effort could be better placed!

    DoES Liverpool could still benefit from some more plant life but there definitely needs to be a plan for maintenance for this sort of thing! 🌻

    Hm.. anything else happen in 2015? Well we made this little announcement:

    As we settled into our new life with work and nursery and with Evie being such a good sleeper we decided that we might actually like to have another little person around the place. Funnily enough while Evie had actually come 10 days late Ethan actually came along exactly on his due date!

    While Ethan seemed originally to be feeding okay we ended up having similar troubles with him losing too much weight and being harassed by mid-wives. After a week of problems we went along to an infant feeding clinic only to be told that Ethan had a tongue tie. A tiny piece of skin was stopping him from being able to move his tongue freely and causing him problems with feeding. Unfortunately our options were limited to waiting 2 months for an appointment in Alder Hey or trying to get it done in Chester Hospital. There was also the option of going private but we really didn’t think we should have to do that and also of the standards of care we’d receive. Being so close to Christmas we were quite concerned about whether we’d managed to get it done before the holidays so we were very happy when we got an appointment for the 23rd December. Poor Ethan ended up picking up a cold meaning the nurse almost couldn’t complete the tongue tie snip, and as it turned out had probably missed some as it really didn’t make much difference to his feeding. It seems ridiculous having to wait three weeks for something that should have been picked up and fixed while he was still in the hospital, and that the much vaunted and well-funded Alder Hey couldn’t do anything about it for months. Obviously we can’t be sure that dealing with it straight away would have reduced the problems, but it would have given Ethan a much better chance and given my poor stressed wife one less thing to worry about!

    I feel I should finish on a lighter note though so let’s back-track to October, we’d been invited to a Halloween party and I couldn’t think of what to go as. My wife spotted a Jack Skellington costume in the shop and came up with the great idea of combining it with one of my old Santa Dash costumes, resulting in this great result:

  • Year Notes: 2014

    Oct 27, 2017

    So obviously after the events at the tail end of 2013, this year was mostly spent dealing with the fact that we now had a tiny (not so tiny) baby to look after! Work-wise I’d stupidly taken on two new clients just before baby came along so while they were freelance clients who were aware of what was happening, it did mean I had some worries about making sure I could do work for them. In the end one of them tailed away to nothing within a few weeks of the new year and the other was just a week or so’s work that I managed to get in while baby was napping.

    In retrospect the newborn stage is actually something of a calm before the storm as they do tend to sleep a lot. We had some issues around baby’s feeding and weight gain which the midwives dutifully freaked us out over but after a few months she did start putting on weight better. In fact once we weaned her onto food, which with perhaps rose-tinted hindsight went pretty well, she started putting on plenty of weight.

    mugged for milk

    The “week’s work” was quite an interesting iPad app and ultimately developed into a continuous 2 days a week. Without going into too much detail it was tourism based and involved having the app open while you were driving a car. It proved quite tricky to develop and test due in part to literally having to go out and drive in a car to get any useful test data. Also my clients were in London and there was times when they would upgrade the app, drive to central London, try to launch the app and find it insta-crashed. The fix was to delete and reinstall, not so easy for a multiple hundred MB app when you’d already gone to the location. With this and another client I’ll get to shortly I learned a lot about the benefits of automated testing, automated smoke testing and continuous integration. The testing tools at the time were not so good as they are now in Xcode but if I had a good method to simulate a drive, and to do smoke tests every time I committed code I could have avoided many of the problems I encountered.

    A few months into the year when I was mainly working on some updates to CamViewer and making further small changes to the iPad app I just mentioned I was approached by John Fagan who I used to work with at Multimap. He was wondering if I’d be interested in taking on a full time role at the company that he was working for - Axon Active. I’d not really been interested in full time roles but in fact as this was a foreign company I would be treated more like a contractor, and the money was pretty decent. Ultimately I told John no, only for him to suggest that I might work just a few days a week for them instead. When I mentioned these talks to the people I’d been engaging with on the other app they jumped at the chance to grab my other free days and so I ended up with 5 paid days a week split between Axon Active (3 days) and the other client.

    Looking back on my tweets from the year I see multiple mentions of running. I’ve never really mentioned running on this blog which is quite bad because it’s become a regular part of my life. In fact in 2013 I ran my first marathon, a milestone I forgot to mention in the previous blog post! In 2014 I ran the same race again but found it much more tricky to fit in training around childcare, I mostly did best efforts at the training plan I was using but ended up with a decent result. While in 2013 I managed an awesome 1:40:00 for the half, I managed to follow it up in 2014 with a very respectable 1:43:25. In 2013 I ended up having real issues with my IT band, causing me to limp the last few miles. Annoyingly in 2014 I actually felt much better and had no issues such as this, but then faced a headwind for the same last miles! I could quite possibly have improved my PR if it wasn’t for that.

    With Axon Active I was working on a small project they’d been developing around taking in various items of data that would be made available on an iPhone, uploading them to a server and from there deriving information about patterns in the way you live and your future plans that we might be able to help you with. At the time we pulled in location and calendar events and would do things such as suggesting a place you might go to nearby for a quick lunch or let you know about travel options for your calendar appointments.

    Axon Active are a Swiss company but most of the people working for them were remote. At the time we had people in France, Edinburgh, London, Brighton, Manchester, even Russia! This allowed me to keep the flexibility of working from DoES Liverpool which was very handy. We would meet every 3 weeks in London for sprint planning and every 3 months for a trip to head office in Switzerland. This worked really well with the new baby, I could choose to work from home or from DoES Liverpool most of the time and the trips to London weren’t too tricky. Having to be away for a week wasn’t so great but it also wasn’t so often. We had plenty of support from my mother in law, Anne, so that made sure I was mostly not leaving my wife home alone with the kid. Also helped that my daughter got really quite good at sleeping from as early as 6 months!

    The project at Axon Active was initially just a side-project for an 8 person team but as the year progressed the company really saw the potential of what we were doing and it culminated in a new UK based company being formed at the very end of the year… but that’s really a story for 2015.

    Again looking back at my tweets I see that after some discussions with Patrick Fenner I had him and his wife Jen Fenner, through their company Deferred Procrastination, help me with a new design of the WhereDial. They actually engaged an old friend Sophie Green to prepare some artwork for the device while Patrick and Jen looked at improving the functional design and the production method. They developed a way of using screen printing to allow much faster printing of designs onto the laser cut materials (ultimately screen printing would take seconds where laser engraving could take 15-20 minutes per piece). The resultant WhereDial looked really good and I was quite happy with the results. Unfortunately as I got busier with life and paid work I found I didn’t have the time to progress this so never got as far as selling the new versions. I’ve had them around my house and on my desk over the years and it’s interesting to note that while they do look good, the design is quite busy and the colours quite low contrast so it can be tricky to tell what’s happening from across a room. Something to keep in mind if I ever get around to developing the WhereDial again!

    The iPad app continued on for much of the year, we found it tricky getting the location based stuff working just how we wanted. We were trying to simulate something that a human would do and the clients had a particular level of quality in mind that was hard to replicate. There was also the need for a sat-nav component in the app, we didn’t want to call out to Apple Maps so would have needed to either build a sat nav ourselves or pull in a third party component. In the end this proved particularly difficult to find for iOS leading them to look at Android as an alternative. With my lack of interest in Android and continuing focus on the Axon Active role we ended up parting ways in Autumn. It was a really interesting app to work on but just had some difficulties that would really have required a lot more development resource than me working on my own. I didn’t hear too much from the clients once I handed the code over to their Android developer and I have a feeling that the project stalled around then.

    That’s probably it for 2014 really, once that app project stopped I found it useful having two days a week to do more work on CamViewer and also found the time to make some changes to the Chess Viewer app that I’d been working on intermittently. As 2014 drew to a close my wife started to think about returning to work and deciding what hours she wanted to do. Axon Active were also looking to setup the UK company and were offering people full time jobs, me included. I really wasn’t sure that I wanted to make that commitment, my stance hadn’t really changed from the beginning of the year, but I wasn’t really looking for any more work and the money was still pretty decent even as an employee so it was a hard decision to make. I didn’t make the decision until the first week of 2015 so I’ll make you wait to hear!

    (Let’s finish up with a photo of me ready for the 5k Santa Dash)

  • Year Notes: 2013

    Oct 20, 2017

    I was tempted to skip this year as I had after all written a blog post that year already, but why not go crazy and write a second one, maybe the 2013 review would have been the first post of 2014 anyway?

    Although I tend to write about geeky work related things on this blog it’s really my personal blog so I should definitely mention that the two major events of 2013 for me were personal rather than work related. We (my wife and I) moved house, and got pregnant! The house move wasn’t particularly planned and just came from noticing a house around the corner from ours that looked interesting, checking it out (awful) but then looking at a few more and deciding that actually we really could manage a nice upgrade, and might need to as we’d be needing more room soon.

    We were lucky that we could afford a lovely big victorian house, which looks nice and provides lots of room for kids and associated “stuff”, but isn’t the best when it comes to heating and having lots of little jobs that need doing. We actually didn’t move in for 3 months after buying it, but still even now have lots of jobs that need doing and some quite large bits of building work we’d like to do, if we could get around to it (making the cellar a usable space and extending the kitchen). Obviously having lots of jobs to do is standard for owning a house but this place definitely seems to take it to another level!

    Also back in 2013 I took on a summer student, Elliot. That was a great experience even if I hadn’t necessarily prepared well enough for having him around. I ended up giving him all sorts of different bits of work to do including upgrades to my CamViewer webcam viewing app and upgrades to the WhereDial. He actually did most of the work towards a Wi-Fi enabled webcam that would have used TP-Link mini Wi-Fi routers as much of the brains with a bespoke Arduino compatible circuit board controlling the motor. Unfortunately in the end I didn’t get around to productising that but hopefully he had some fun working on it and got some good experience. After that summer he went back to university to finish his degree then had no problem finding a job. I haven’t caught up with him in a while but I believe he’s still doing well and applying his great versatility to working on a variety of things from back-end server coding to mobile app dev.

    During the summer of 2013 I, with Adrian McEwen, Hakim Cassimally and Aine McGuire exhibited at Internet World trade show in Earls Court, London. That was quite an interesting experience. We were given a prime spot at the entrance to the show and used it to demonstrate a variety of IoT devices including the WhereDial and Bubblino, Hakim and Adrian also promoted their book Designing the Internet of Things. And because spending a week in London wasn’t enough we then spent the following weekend in Newcastle for Makerfaire!

    Makerfaire 2013

    Wow, looking at my notes that was when my relationship with ExamsTutor ended. Unfortunately it didn’t end as well as I’d have liked, they simply decided they did not want to continue the relationship and largely cut off communication. I had owned the IP behind the apps so no further development occurred on those and it looks like they got removed from the app store in Apple’s great cull of 2016 (removing any app that hadn’t been updated in years). A shame to end that way as I’d enjoyed working with them but there wasn’t much I could do once they stopped replying to emails.

    My relationship with 7digital also ended this year, as I recall they were looking to take development in-house which was fair enough. I don’t think iOS was ever really a huge priority for them as Apple’s app store rules made it difficult for them to make any money from the app. I know they continued using my codebase for a few years after, it’s hard to tell if they still do, the app’s structure hasn’t changed too much but it’s quite likely it’s had some restructuring under the hood.

    As mentioned I (and Elliot) also continued working on CamViewer through that year. Interestingly looking at the Changelog that year seems to have been the start of me adding more functionality to the app. At the end of the year I added support for “HD” cameras that use RTSP by integrating a paid-for library. That was just in time for me to use cameras such as this as baby monitors, something I and my wife have both found really handy over the years.

    Pretty much the last thing that happened in this year, Evie was born!

    Actually 6 months old in this picture

    So that’s a review of 2013 done, just 3 more years to cover (assuming I get this done quickly, considering I started this blog post in January (2017) that may not be the case!)

  • New New Blog, New Old Blog

    Jun 24, 2017

    So I’ve decided to replace my previous blog with a WordPress blog.

    That was the first line I put on my WordPress blog, which I’ve now replaced with Jekyll. The first post on that was in October 2006, so nearly 11 years ago!

    Over the past 11 years I’ve moved away from doing anything PHP, or anything server-side really. I have no particular need of the online editing that you get with WordPress or any of the other features really. I’m also trying to be quite paranoid about what daemons I run on my hosting server. I came across Jekyll (again) as part of a documentation project in my day job and was impressed by how easy it was to use so decided I would start migrating some of my own stuff over.

    My first migration was actually the website for my CamViewer iOS app which was already based on Gollum the markdown wiki so should have been quite simple to migrate (actually it was still a bit of a faff due to different markdown versions).

    I hoped migrating Wordpress would also be easy as so many people use both technologies. As it turned out there was still plenty of work involved. I ended up using two migration tools. The main Jekyll importer didn’t seem to do a great job of pulling the HTML in but pulled all the comments across nicely so I ended up using exitwp and writing a yaml copying tool to pull the comments from one to the other.

    This blog hasn’t actually got any comments functionality at the moment, I figure people can ping me @mcknut on Twitter if they want to make comments but I’ve copied the ones that were on the old site.

    My previous blog made use of whizzy fun modern technologies to allow me to host my entire site on Google Base, Google Pages and del.icio.us. Unfortunately, because it was something I had just knocked up there was no comment support, and of course it did require Java and JavaScript to be enabled in the browser.

    That original blog was quite a weird thing, I tried to make it so that all the content was hosted online. Unfortunately as it was JavaScript based not much has been saved on the Internet Archive. It does seem like all the original posts are now lost but with any luck I’ve got the content… somewhere.

  • Long time no see

    Jan 18, 2017

    It’s been a very long time since I’ve written anything here. I thought I’d like to write up a small project I did recently, but then there would be a bit of back story, and then a bit more, and oh yes I haven’t blogged in 4 years so I should really do something about that.

    As such I’m going to try to write some year reviews. Not promising to make them in depth but it’ll give me a chance to look back and see what I’ve actually been doing all these years (actually it’s pretty obvious to me given that the last post was 4 years ago and a major thing happened just after that but here’s goes nothing..!)

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