Blog posts by Harry Metcalfe

We’re excited to announce that Lily Dart has joined dxw. As our first permanent designer, she’ll be working on the look and feel of most of our projects. Having a designer on the team will make it much easier for us to react quickly when our clients need things that need pretty. She’ll also be […]

For a while, we’ve been working on a stand-alone web server for doing WordPress development. We started working on it for a few reasons: With all those in mind, we started writing some software to wrap around PHP 5.4’s built-in webserver. It accepts requests, figures out where they should go, and hooks into the WordPress […]

Developing rails apps under Ubuntu means that we get a lot of these warnings: DEPRECATION WARNING: require “activerecord” is deprecated and will be removed in Rails 3. Use require “active_record” instead. (called from at /usr/lib/ruby/vendor_ruby/activerecord.rb:2) Recently, we added a cron job to an app which meant that we were getting emailed this error every hour, […]

I hate the caps lock: it seems to exist just to give me strings of shouty text and to confuse vim. Normally, I just pop it off my keyboard. But I just got a nice new Das Keyboard professional, and I didn’t want to mutilate it. I had a quick Google and found lots of […]

Alphagov. It’s here, it’s great, and if it’s taken forward, it will herald a great deal of positive change. Not just on the web, but in the way that government does things – and that will bring harder challenges. There’s lots in Alphagov to be pleased about. It’s not perfect, but as an attempt to […]

The Hack Day that we participated in in India was great. A real experience. I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of it. In the end, there wasn’t a lot of time for much hacking, but we had fantastic conversations about India’s problems and projects. Chief among the Indian projects was some amazing mapping and […]