Phil Sturgeon

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Phil Sturgeon

Phil Sturgeon

Software Engineer gone ferril. Digital nomad since 2018 (bike/van). Now dedicated to woodland creation and restoration, as co-founder of UK climate chairty Protect Earth.

Why Is Everyone Outraged?

There have been about twenty articles I want to write about equality in tech, and they all end up crossing over into one big mess. I'm going to start unpicking these articles into a series, and I want to start by asking this question. Is everyone really offended?

Lessons Learned Running a Dropshipped T-Shirt Company

Made in Production has been something that my BFF Zack and I have been working on for a while. We had the idea to start selling super-niche programming t-shirts in 2013, we finally got the store up and running on some janky Python in 2014, then shut it down after

HTTP/REST API File Uploads

File uploads are one thing that always feel rather complicated, and working out how to handle this in an API doesn't make life easier. For many programmers, this has been abstracted away behind the HTTP standard, HTML and convenient features in languages like PHP, that populate a $_FILES

Everyones Favourite Twitter Characters

Regularly, I make a general piece of advice, and the types of responses are pretty similar regardless of the actual conversation. Lets take a fairly innocuous example: BikeTip: When buying a bike, if the tyres are flat, walk away. That bike is probably fucked and you're being tricked.

HTTP Status Codes Are Not Enough

I spotted an article called Just learn Rails (Part 3) HTTP status codes. It started off good, and I liked that it was teaching people to avoid hardcoding their HTTP status codes in code, using :conflict instead of 409 and the like. That is a good message to send, which

Auto-Incrementing IDs: Giving API Data Away

Something we're always taught as developers, usually by tutorials or via the defaults in various ORM tools, is every SQL table needs an auto-incrementing ID. This is a weirdly common fallacy, enforced by old tutorials, new tutorials and half-arsed tooling in various forms. Why are auto-incrementing IDs a

The Ratio of Women Speakers in Tech

There are a lot of my opinions and viewpoints that have changed over time. Some slowly and naturally, and some sharp and sudden like a wet mackerel to the face. One is on the ratio of women speakers when it comes to tech conferences. I previously held an opinion like