This bit between Christmas and New Year is one of my favourite times of year — plenty of cheese in the house, minimal expectations all round and an opportunity to catch up with friends. That said, as it’s one of Dunelm’s busiest periods, the effort that goes into getting us…

I recently had the opportunity to be a judge for the European Software Testing Awards. I know what you’re thinking. It’s probably the same as Mahatma Gandhi: “Imperfect men have no right to judge other imperfect men”, and you’d be right (I’m also sure he meant “people”). …

I recently gave a talk at the Enterprise IT Strategy Forum about maximising software development productivity. As shown in the photo below, despite reading through my slides numerous times, I clearly forgot to proof read the opening one…oops! Typos aside, it was all good fun and led to many…

Pickled vegetables are great. Arguably, the greatest pickled vegetable is the gherkin. It is said, that they were once cucumbers, but who knows the origin story...and truthfully, who cares, they’re tasty and add an essential twang to a barbeque treat. But what can these pickled delights teach us? Unsurprisingly, not…

You hear a lot about how modern smartphones are 1000s of times more powerful than the NASA computers that sent Apollo to the moon. To be honest, it’s surprising, but you do kind of expect it… But how do those old school beasts match up against something a bit more…

Made To Measure: The story, the journey from within… Our made to measure offering is one of Dunelm’s key heritage products, as selling curtain seconds on a market stall was where it all started for us. I say that, but it was actually 600 pairs of slippers that Bill was…

INDUCTION What a warm welcome we had to the tech department! The two-week induction involved meeting key people in the business giving us a good insight into possible rotations for our grad scheme. A few highlights were visiting our Stoke distribution centres, our manufacturing centre and meeting a few of our…

Imagine how futuristic it feels to control a drone by just moving your hand around in 3D space. In this project I did exactly that. It involved reverse engineering the protocol used to send commands to this small drone, assembling the hardware (a TinyPICO V2 and BNO055 IMU), and building…

Continuing to push analogies to breaking point…This time with fries! You might have seen a post recently with describing an application as front end, back end and API. Something along these lines: