Solution Delivery

We recently completed a project to transform a client's Content Management System (CMS) from the Sitecore platform to Umbraco. My part was to figure out how to migrate the content using a systematic, repeatable methodology. That's what we're going to cover off here to help you do the same. The constraint? We did not have access to any of the customised source code, only the d ...

At Code Wizards we're very lucky with our clients and friends.  Today was a great day as we were a small part of the launch of Music for Youth's The Future Is Now programme. Music for Youth ("MFY") have spent 50 years (yes fifty!) helping young people to have enjoy, perform, compose and be part of music.  This body of work has helped 10,000s of young people find a productive a ...

We're often approached by companies struggling to find a way forwards.  They've got old or unloved applications that are core to their business but nobody to support, develop or manage them.  Too often other software teams tell the software is unfixable and the only sensible approach is a complete rewrite.  Most of the time this is great for the developers and the wrong thing f ...

Umbraco is an amazing CMS.  Out of the box you can easily manage who can see private content but all your other assets are assumed available.

We've created a simple package to secure these assets and we're making it available to the community.

In my experience using Power BI, but I have come across some pitfalls with ingestion of data from relational databases. The primary issue is around trying to set up the relationships between the different tables to create a star schema to report upon. In this article, I hope to show some tricks I have learned as convention when creating / generating the source data to be ingest ...

Why use Unity for Prototyping?

Unity is a great tool for rapid prototyping, it allows you to make changes quickly and build to a variety of different platforms without having to alter the code, which is handy too say the least.

We often build mobile games to HTML5/canvas which allows clients to play the game while development or changes are in progress without having to install APKs or Testflight.  This allows a tighter team interaction and allows producers to see changes and work with them quickly.

We find even where the finished game will use a different engine or be coded natively to a platform (for example Unreal Engine or iOS or Android native builds) then Unity allows us to move much much faster with a prototype and that iteration allows a better final product once we move from prototyping and design into the productionisation/realisation phase of the game.

Unity is great for proof of concept work as you can quickly make a scene, shove in a few objects and get them doing what you want pretty quickly. It might not look great, but getting the mechanics down is fairly quick and easy.

TheGivingMachine is a registered charity that enables online shoppers to support a wide array of causes within the UK (e.g. schools, charities and a whole host of community groups). Shoppers can raise free donations for their chosen causes while they shop online – donations are generated via affiliate marketing raising commissions which are then donated to registered shopper’s chosen causes.

TheGivingMachine Team are a genuinely lovely bunch. Their passion for restoring a sense of giving and community is so refreshing in the divided times we live in as of late. Basically, you’d want them to be your neighbours as I imagine they’re the type of people that are always going to have the correct bins out and they’d never take your parking space without asking first. A thoroughly awesome group!  

The biggest bugbear with one of the many roles I perform is the misconception that technical project management is just a fancier name for project management. It really isn’t. 

Technical Project Management and Project Managers more generally have some shared elements.

• Reporting on task progress
• Raising issues and risks
• Tracking actions
• Tracking burn/spend