Iain Collins – Medium

Pinned

Gaming: The difficulty with difficulty

A vigorous agreement with an article about difficulty in video games written by MR BIFFO called HOW HARD CAN IT BE? — Difficulty modes in the 1980s console games allowed them to cater simultaneously for casual, less experienced, gamers while still providing appeal to a more hardcore audience — those who’d already played said game and several others like it to the point of obsession. The appearance of selectable difficulty levels in…

Gaming

11 min read

Gaming

11 min read

Pinned

Better error handling in JavaScript

How and why to use custom error types in JavaScript — Handling errors well can be tricky. How Error() historically worked in JavaScript hasn’t made this easier, but using the Error class introduced in ES6 can be helpful Throwing errors in JavaScript JavaScript supports try/catch/finally but the Error object it uses works differently from Exceptions in other languages and it doesn’t provide a way to…

JavaScript

6 min read

JavaScript

6 min read

Pinned

Allegations of bias on BBC Question Time

Do claims of bias in BBC Question Time panel have merit? — Update: This analysis was referenced in The Economist. The BBC has been fighting back against accusations of bias in the selection of political guests. Such accusations are not new, but do they have merit? In an attempt to defend the impartiality of the show the BBC Press Team recently published…

BBC

3 min read

BBC

3 min read

Feb 16, 2018

Calling HTTPS URLs from http://localhost

Working around Cross Origin restrictions during development — Making requests to HTTPS APIs from HTTP sites running on localhost can be a pain, especially as browsers keep changing how they expose the option. Browser Settings The only way to turn off Cross Origin Restrictions in Chrome is to turn off the feature completely when starting the browser by passing arguments…

JavaScript

3 min read

JavaScript

3 min read

Feb 1, 2018

Automated Deployment on Docker Swarm

From GitHub to Docker Hub to Docker Swarm — Configuring automated deployment of an image to Docker Hub every time a change is pushed to a specific GitHub branch (or when a new release is tagged) is easy to do with Docker Hub user interface. Docker Hub will automatically configure your GitHub repository to trigger this for you and…

Docker

3 min read

Docker

3 min read

Jan 28, 2018

NextAuth

Authentication for Next.js — Update June 2020 The next generation version NextAuth.js was released in June 2020! It is built for Next.js and Serverless, with simple configuration, out of the box support for a large number of authentication services and supports MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL and MongoDB — or can be used without needing a database! Find detailed…

JavaScript

2 min read

JavaScript

2 min read

Nov 15, 2017

How to run a command on every node in a Docker Swarm cluster

Docker Swarm is a great way to deploy Docker Containers on AWS or Azure, both of which are supported cloud providers for Docker Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). A common admin task can be needing to run a command on all nodes on a cluster, either for monitoring…

Docker

3 min read

Docker

3 min read

Published in glitch digital

·Aug 4, 2017

Mercury Milestone One

A web based tool for video and audio transcription, translation, captioning and video creation. — Less than a month ago we released the first public version of our automated video transcription and translation tool Mercury, supported by prototype funding from the Google Digital News Initiative. We now have hundreds of registered users and hundreds of videos uploaded. This is a progress update on how things…

Translation

7 min read

Translation

7 min read

Published in glitch digital

·Jun 23, 2017

Getting started with Docker

A guide to using Docker for the first time. — This guide was origionally written as internal documentation, before Docker Community Edition for Windows and Mac was published. Docker Community Edition is the easiest and most robust way to run Docker on Windows or Mac, as it does most of the setup work for you. This guide is useful for…

Docker

9 min read

Docker

9 min read

Apr 20, 2017

Articulate: A Smart Editor

Update: We are looking at rolling the exploratory work we’ve done on this into another project we are working on with a larger team! We recently picked a “Smart Editor” as as one of the project we’d like to work on. …

Writing

1 min read

Writing

1 min read