Blog Category: Blog

At BrightMinded, we know that our clients are some of the best in their fields. But one day we thought to ourselves, does everyone else know? We’re sure that many people are aware of the great work they do, but just in case you aren’t, we’ve decided to introduce them to you in this series of spotlights called ”Our awesome clients”. We’ll tell you all about their impressive achievements, how they’re doing it, and how we managed to get involved with them.

Someone: “Hey, check out this juicy programming problem!” Dan Cowan: “I can think of at least three ways of solving it.” Does that mean Dan’s a genius? Perhaps (if you ask him, he’ll say yes). Another possibility is that whilst learning his craft he developed the habit of thinking of alternative ways of solving the same problems. In fact, I would argue that the extent of his (coding) skills is a direct consequence of this habit.

David explores a huge GitHub dataset of open source code looking for patterns in JavaScript functions

At BrightMinded, we spend a lot of time working with WordPress. We really do know it inside out! However, we often find ourselves needing to go above and beyond the out-of-the-box capabilities that WordPress core provides us with. A frequent complaint we hear, both from members of our team and the wider development community, is that WordPress lacks a proper routing system, of the sort provided by modern web frameworks like Laravel, Express.js or Django. However, with a little knowledge of how the WordPress routing (rewrite) system works, there is no reason for it to limit the development possibilities available.

BitBucket Pipelines is a service that allows you to easily set up automated deployment on a remote server. In this post, we will detail the steps involved and explain how everything works.

Your company has just moved into a new office. You and your team realised that it could do with some decorating and a touch of personalisation. What do you do? Hire a decorator? Buy art online? Nah. At BrightMinded we decided to take matters into our own hands the best way we know how! Here’s a non-technical account of something we tried.

If only there were a tool to turn redirect mappings from clients into something Apache understands, validating and error-reporting along the way….

Displaying a brief history of BrightMinded.

As programmers, problem solving is a big part of the software development process. Frequently these problems are complicated enough that we need help, and in these moments it is tempting to turn to our co-workers for assistance. But there’s a better alternative: Rubber Duck Debugging. In software development, rubber duck debugging is a method of debugging code.

At the time of this writing there is no satisfactory business model that addresses licensing of copyrighted content for use in Cognitive Computing Applications (CCAs) and APIs such as IBM Watson™. We propose a novel solution based on Blockchain technology that simultaneously guarantees proof of ownership of the content, incentivises the content owner/publisher to distribute via the new channel and guarantees pricing fairness and cost control for CCAs implementors through accurate measure of actual, real-time content usage.

Most front-end developers understand what accessibility is, and why it’s a good idea, but for many of us it’s an area filled with confusion and conflicting advice. I want to show how accessibility doesn’t have to be complex, and that by building it in from the start we can build better experiences for our users.

A funny thing happened on the way out of the office on a Friday evening. It turned out that Gerry Hussein, ­the organiser of the Brighton and Hove Ethereum Meetup group I had just joined a few days earlier, ­works in our building. In fact just two doors away from our office! Gerry is a business analyst and an advocate of new, potentially disruptive technologies in both the social and business realms. I on the other hand needed an excuse to play with an exciting piece of tech called Blockchains ­an implementation of which is, you guessed it, Ethereum. Gerry had the excellent idea of joining forces to organise an event for the Brighton Digital Festival that would be focussed on exploring different perspectives: the socio­political aspects (Gerry’s turf), possible applications (Gerry’s turf), and the actual technology (my turf!). It seemed the right time to do this for several reasons: ­Blockchains have the potential to become a disruptive technology and a whole world of opportunity and rewards is available to those pioneers who establish themselves early. ­