So long Wordpress, Hello Github Pages

Over the years I have used many different platforms to serve up this blog including, Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal and SquareSpace. At the time of writing this post I’m hosting it on Wordpress.com (using Wordpress obviously) but this post will never appear there. Why?

Well, the blog started life as an aide memoire for myself so that I could save myself the time trawling the Internet when I’d managed to resolve some issue or other. If it helped others along the way then all well and good.

When I branched out as an Independant Contractor I extended it to become my company website giving me a web presence allowing clients to see what I’ve been working on.

After nine years of contracting and as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic essentially closing down the market here in the UK I decided to return to ‘normal’ employment so the site reverted back to the blog is started out as.

Now, when I was contracting it was my company that was paying wordpress.com £240/yr for the Business Plan, which I needed due to a handful of plugins I was using. However, after shutting my company down and swapping payment to my personal card I forgot all about this and ended up paying it myself when it renewed after I’d reverted it to being a simple blog. Not the end of the world but basically money I didn’t really need to spend.

With that in mind I decided to contact Wordpress.com about downgrading the site to the Personal plan so that I could save a bit of cash (I have another personal blog on that plan costing me just £37/yr) - and that’s where the ‘fun’ started.

Apple Certs and Profiles – without a Mac

While I have used Windows 10 for the screenshots etc I am reliably informed that the process also works for Windows 11

I think we will all agree that the annual chore of regenerating signing certificates and provisioning profiles for our iOS project is just that – a chore. Not only do we have to remember the dance that we performed the year before but also need to dust off the Mac Mini and hope it boots.

But why a Mac Mini? Why are we tied to using Apple hardware to generate our certificate signing request and to export the resulting certificate in the correct format?

Well, as it turns out ….. we don’t, we can in fact use Windows 10 using built in tooling.

Running Linux on a Mac! Why?

I never like to throw anything away and when it comes to technology, you never know when you may need it.

So when my 2013 iMac stopped receiving OS updates from Apple I wondered what I could do with it.

Afterall, if it won’t run the latest OS then it won’t run the latest version of XCode and if it can’t run the latest version of XCode then I can’t use it to develop apps for iOS. More accurately, I can develop the apps but because I can’t compile against the latest SDK ultimately the App Store will reject them.

As my MacBook Pro had taken over the role of Xamarin development system the iMac had sat under my desk, unused for months.

So while Apple’s policy of, essentially, obsoleting my hardware is frustrating that doesn’t mean I have to throw the whole thing out – that’s not in my nature. So what could I do with it?

Why do I watch Beginner Pluralsight courses?

Like many developers around the world I have a subscription to Pluralsight, an online service that provides high quality training courses for Software Developers (and many other professions/skills).

However, unlike many other developers and despite having a couple of decades of development experience behind me, I don’t shy away from the courses marked as Beginner.

I know that many will think these courses as being beneath them but while some of the material may be fairly basic for me there is always something to learn, even if it’s ‘just’ how to explain something to a more junior developer.

End of the road for 8yo Workstation?

Back in 2013 I bought myself a shiny new, custom built workstation from Scan Computers. Costing me around £1300 I had opted for a pretty decent spec for the time:

• Intel i7-3770 3.4GHz CPU
• 32 GB RAM
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 650Ti
• 250 GB SSD + 500GB spinning rust HDD

By todays standards this is probably pretty lame but it certainly kicked my old PC into a cocked hat! Able to run three monitors and all the speed I needed with a good amount of headroom.

That said, it still runs pretty well today (some 8 years later) and has served me very well throughout my contracting/freelance work. Today it’s my daily driver while I’m working from home.

Booting from cold to logged in and ready to work takes around 25 seconds (pretty slow in these days of instant gratification but it take me that long to pour a coffee so it’s not a problem) and I’ve never really had any major speed issues with anything I’ve thrown at it …. until recently that is.