All posts by Aaron

A Personal Growth Framework

This is a brief summary of my QCon conference talk on professional development. If you’re here because of that talk, and want to jump straight into the action, you can find the Personal Growth Framework PDF here. What are you focussing on right now to progress in your career? Ultimately you own your professional development, […]

A brief history of the strangest emoji

Emoji is the world’s fastest growing language, and like any other, it’s not without its quirks. Meet “man in business suit levitating” 🕴, a real emoji (Unicode code point U+1F574) with a fascinating music and tech history. Here’s an infographic I made to share the story: Hat tip to the excellent Newsweek article and The […]

Cracking the Adventure Time Cipher

I recently read “Adventure Time: Volume 1”, a comic book based on the smart animated series of the same name. In the comic, I found some odd looking messages at the bottom of two pages, which turned out to be encrypted text. Here’s how, with a fair few hours of my life and the help of some Ruby scripts, I cracked The […]

Megabite

Megabite is a mobile app that automatically turns a photo of your food into a face. Let’s face it, food is more fun when it looks happy. I was playing with my food one lunchtime, and I wondered to myself – would it be possible to automate this process? Solving the big problems right here. This was a […]

Screentendo

Screentendo is a desktop application that allows you to turn a selection of your screen into a playable level of Super Mario Bros. I’ve never built a Cocoa app or used Sprite Kit before, so it was a great excuse to play with both technologies. You can get the (very hacky) source code here. How does it […]

Robot-Sara – a recommendations robot

WOWHack is an annual, 2-day music hack event which precedes Way Out West festival, and this year Spotify kindly put us up in their Gothenburg office for the event. 67 developers organised themselves into 25 teams, and spent 2 days building cool music-related hacks. My hack was called “Robot-Sara”, and this is a pretty accurate description of […]