Dean Hume's Blog

Text-to-Speech

Getting started with Azure's Hybrid and Embedded Text-to-Speech

Over the past few months, I've been experimenting with Azure's Text-to-Speech service. It is a super powerful API that enables fluid, natural-sounding text to speech that matches the tone and emotion of human voices. Whether you are building an app or a game, Text-to-Speech can be very useful. For example,

Azure Function Timer Trigger not firing - NCrontab

If you've recently ventured into the world of Azure Functions, you're likely familiar with the versatility they offer when it comes to scheduling tasks. In this guide, we'll delve into using Azure Functions' Time Trigger function with Node.js and Visual Studio Code, uncovering some important nuances along the way.

Charts

Using a Raspberry Pi to track the progress of your homebrew

In this article I go into detail about how I hooked up a Raspberry to continually track and monitor the progress of my beer all whilst graphing it out to another application. It gets a little geeky!

Service Workers

Has Service Worker usage increased on this website over the past four years?

It's been almost four years since I started collecting data on Service Worker usage and support on this website and in this article I show the details.

Leadership

Leading Virtual Teams - Book Review

I’m always on the lookout to improve both myself and my team's daily work, so when I came across a book entitled Leading Virtual Teams by the Harvard Business Review, it really caught my eye.

Ghost

Ghost CMS & Linux - Fixing "No Space Left on Device" Issue

I was quite surprised to found out that I was greeted with an annoying HTTP 503 error on my site over the Christmas period. After taking a closer look at the logs on Amazon, it turns out that I had actually run out of disk space on the instance.

Book Review

Book Review - Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops

During my morning coffee session, I came across the book - Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and Devops, and the title of the book instantly drew me in.

Book Review

The People Manager: A Guide for the First Time Manager - has been published!

Behind the scenes, I have been working on a new book with my EA colleague Jo Root. I am super excited to announce that The People Manager: A Guide for the First Time Manager has been published! This is a personal project that has been a year in the making.

My Favourite Soft Skills Interview Questions

In my day to day role, a big part of what I do involves hiring and assessing Software Engineers. It might not be to everyone’s liking, but I really do enjoy the interview process. It’s a great chance to meet new people and I often learn new things

JavaScript

Experimenting with the Streams API

I am always looking for ways to build faster, slicker web pages. Where applicable, I’ll use great new browser features such as service workers, HTTP/2 and improved compression, just to name a few. But what if I told you there was a way to build even faster web

Progressive Web Apps

Brewfather - Progressive App Review

In my spare time I enjoy a little bit of homebrewing. What first started out as an experiment with a beer kit, soon turned into a geeky fascination with the science behind brewing beer. I am one of those annoying people that sniffs the beer and comments on the aroma

Progressive Web Apps

Determining Service Worker Support for your Site

Have you ever thought about building a Progressive Web App or even adding a service worker to your website? Perhaps you’ve considered it, but weren’t too sure about whether or not your users were on browsers that supported these features. Would they even benefit from their features? Speaking

Ghost

Tips for setting up a Ghost blog on Amazon AWS EC2

After a long overdue refresh, I have recently moved this blog to Ghost CMS. Overall, I have been very impressed.  Ghost is easy to use as an editor, quick to make updates, and the Ghost team are constantly pushing out updates - which is great considering that it is completely

Software Team Maturity Matrix

Whether you lead a small team of developers, a tech startup or a huge department, it’s important that you constantly strive to improve the processes and tools that you use. If things are going really well, it’s easy to become confident in your abilities and overlook the need

Progressive Web Apps

Dynamic resources using the Network Information API and service workers

The Network Information API allows developers to determine the connection types and the underlying connection technology that the user agent is using. In terms of web performance, this brings a whole new level to the way that we build web pages.

JavaScript

Getting started with the Ambient Light Sensor

The Ambient Light Sensor API provides developers with the means to determine ambient light levels as detected by the device’s main light detector. This information is available to developers in terms of lux units.

Progressive Web Apps - Book Giveaway - Results

Firstly, I'd like to say a massive thank you to everyone who retweeted and liked the tweet for this giveaway. Unfortunately, there can only be a few winners for this giveaway. I can reveal that the following people were chosen at random using random.org to generate the results: * Kristian

Progressive Web Apps

How to display a "new version available" for a Progressive Web App

In this article, I will show you how to add a notification to your site and display it each time that there is a new version of the service worker available. You’ll also learn how to refresh the page, so that the user is up to date and has the latest version of any cached files.

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps - Book Giveaway

"Progressive Web Apps" has recently been released, and if you haven't already gotten your hands on a copy, I have 5 free copies to give away to lucky readers.

Progressive Web Apps

Service Workers can save the environment!

Service workers allow you to cache resources on the user's device when they visit your site for the first time. Fewer HTTP requests mean less CPU usage and less energy consumed.

Progressive Web Apps

Converting a Ghost blog to a Progressive Web App

In this article, I am going to take you through the different steps required to get a Ghost blog up and running as a Progressive Web App (*hint: it’s easier than you think!*)

Leadership

Lessons learnt: Leaving an organisation

In my experience, leaving an organisation is a big deal. Given the amount of time we spend at work, we ultimately end up spending more time with our colleagues than our loved ones! If you’ve been with an organisation for a while, you’ve probably worked hard to establish

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps - My new book is available!

I am super excited to announce that my latest book has been published and is available to purchase! A few years ago, I was sitting in a conference room listening to Google’s Alex Russell talk about Service Workers and how they were the next big thing that was going

Web Performance

Guest Posts and Advent Calendars

This year, I’ve been lucky enough to write two articles for two great “advent calendar” style sites. I try to write for the Performance Calendar every year around this time and this year I’ve written about progressive image loading using Intersection Observer and SQIP. In this article, I

Progressive Web Apps

Progressive Web Apps - Podcast

I was lucky enough to be interviewed recently by Matthew Groves on his podcast Cross Cutting Concerns where I talked about Progressive Web Apps. We discussed the basics of Progressive Web Apps and the different tools and techniques available to web developers. Matthew has had some pretty cool speakers on