In 2021 I published a post titled “Why I Gave Up Software Development To Be A Blogger” which discussed why I made the decision to give up my career in software development, to become a content creator/digital media business owner. It proved to be a great decision because: By the middle of last year, I … Read more
30th November 2022 was quite a big day: Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT, an AI ‘chat bot’ which is… significantly more powerful than the 2000-era chat bots we are used to. Someone built a virtual machine inside ChatGPT. Others used it to write short movies, code for their job, essays for school and college, and a … Read more
I recently gave up a perfectly good career as a software developer, and instead I plan to write blog posts and shoot YouTube videos for a living. I figure that it’s worth writing down why I have made this decision – if only for myself. I don’t fully know what I’m going to write here … Read more
Many websites I visit nowadays seem quite bloated. Fairly plain websites whose pages carry out 200+ HTTP requests, pages with 1 MB+ of Javascript to download before they can render a simple website etc. Hence I’ve found Jekyll to be a really useful tool in generating simple, static HTML websites – but with the power of blog … Read more
My wife and I had our gorgeous baby son at the end of May. Whilst neither of us are hardened environmentalists, we have always tried to reduce waste where possible… which is tricky with a newborn baby! After all, babies go through a lot of nappies, wet wipes and cotton wool and clothes. Plus raising a newborn … Read more
In 2014 I started re-writing Plagiarism Guard in Python 3 using the Django framework (after starting off writing it in PHP). Plagiarism Guard was a plagiarism detection service. I mainly did this to teach myself Python (kudos to Learn Python the Hard Way) and also implement some (very!) basic NLP. I recently came across the source code and since … Read more
As mentioned on the homepage, whilst I am a full stack developer overall, I am currently doing more work on the server side area – especially with building more diverse, cloud-oriented applications.; mainly using Java 8 and Spring Cloud. Spring Cloud is a collection of tools, mainly of whom are powered by Netflix technologies such as: Eureka – … Read more
Back in 2014, I knocked up a simple jQuery image lightbox script based on jQuery V1. However this script now needs a slight tweak to work for V3, hence the final script has been updated at http://www.tristanperry.com/lightweight-lightbox/, and also on GitHub The only change is due to a change in jQuery 3’s breaking change to the load() function signature, and … Read more
I recently needed a simple image lightbox for one of my websites, however all the scripts I found online seemed overkill in that their file size were fairly large (as much as 60 KB), and some didn’t even lazy-load the images. So I set about creating a lightweight lightbox script which does lazy-loads – i.e. … Read more
Note: This article was written in late 2014, and whilst a lot of the commands and advise in this article are still relevant, a couple of links might be to an old ‘end of line’ version of software Plagiarism Guard’s footer has a ‘Blog Feed’ section which lists the five most recent blog posts from … Read more