To finish off my undergrad degree, I had to complete a long-term Final Year Project that I'd start in September and finish by April.

I've been really interested in the role tech can play in improving public transport recently, and over the summer I started using Dublinbikes as the final leg of my commute. I knew Dublinbikes had a great open API and I thought it would be interesting to make something substational with it.

It was a real rollercoaster of a project with many, many failures (which I might put into its own post when I've a bit of perspective), but in the end I'm really happy with how everything ended up.

I have a bit of a Twitter tradition of posting a chart of my favourite albums of each year. I repeated that tradition for 2019, picking out 24 albums that I really liked that came out this year. I thought I'd change things up this year with a bit of a write-up about these albums, what I liked about them and hopefully I'll be able to introduce you to something you haven't heard before.

Soooo I've rearranged things on here again. I've had free shared web hosting on www.ecowebhosting.co.uk for the past three or four years, but that's finally running out very soon. So I decided I'd move this site over to Netlify, because it has no reason not to be static. The homepage was fine but for this blog, I moved from WordPress over to Jekyll with the Poole theme. I made very few adjustments to the default, apart from adding post previews to the homepage instead of the full post.

I know I posted eight or so hours ago, but I've done a lot of work in that time. I've finished the Archive page, and set up a linking system that loads specific tracks into the Home component depending on what URL is entered.

To start with, I made up the Archive in HTML. I used a flexbox so it shows a specific number of cards per line depending on the width of the user screen. I absolutely love flexboxes and they make CSS so much easier. If I'm doing anything with CSS at all, I seem to default to flexbox. It just makes everything look so pretty on both my laptop and my phone.

So far this week, I've made some good progress in getting this project up and running.

To start things off, the most important thing was to get rid of the hardcoding in the website. I don't want to have to manually update HTML every day just to add a new song. I could use a database for this, but I don't want to pay for a server, so I'm aiming for using a free host like Netlify or Github Pages. To this, I need the website to be static. That's where the idea of reading from a simple JSON file came from. It means I just have to add details about a new track to the JSON file and the details will fill in automatically. This seems to play pretty nicely with React as well.

It’s been a long day, but I got a lot of work done in relation to this project. I started off finishing off my design concept. I put in the black gradient that I mentioned in the last post and added a review placeholder (which I borrowed from Hot Press – sorry guys!).

So, I’ve had an idea that I think is good enough to make into a full side-project. It’s nothing super technical, it’s not a million-dollar idea, but it’s something fun that I think could have an impact on my community. Without giving the specific idea away, it’s a website that involves playing music in some way.

Wow. It's been a while since I've made a blog.

I've been doing a lot of dev-work in my spare time over the summer. I started off by finishing Udacity’s Android Basics nanodegree, which I got for free through Grow with Google’s scholarship scheme. For the record, I really recommend that any tech students apply for this scholarship. The course was really good and the projects we completed were very good. Here’s a link for the US version (EU is closed at the moment). In that course I made a couple of apps, all of which are on my Github.