OUR BLOG

As specialist Umbraco developers, we often get called into projects when they hit a crisis. Either something has gone badly wrong, the relationship had gone sour, or there’s no single issue to point the finger at, but a million small cuts. So we’ve got a lot of experience in what can go wrong on a project. And one of the things we see time and time again is websites and webapps built by agencies that don’t follow best practice like using source control systems. Why does this matter? Source control systems like Git and Subversion are databases for the code…

When you’re commissioning a new Umbraco site, it can be useful to start planning for the task of testing what has been delivered by your developers.  A planned and thoughtful approach to User Acceptance Testing can reduce the time taken and ensure better coverage of the system as well as one that is ultimately better at the end. Developing a Strategy for Acceptance Testing  During the early product planning stages, it’s worth discussing acceptance testing to understand the agency’s standard approach. Will they develop the system in an iterative way and expect you to contribute to acceptance testing during…

If you’re going to build a website or app you need to face facts: it’s going to have bugs.  Bugs have existed in software since Grace Murray Hopper found her punch card program failed because a moth got trapped in the reader.   Bugs are a fact of software life, because humans are fallible. We make mistakes, we misunderstand specs, we write algorithms incorrectly, or we use the wrong variable.  We believe that instead of trying to write perfect code, we should spend as much time trying to write a good trap.  Testing, therefore, is the saviour of poorly-written code. Approaches…

I presented at Code Garden for the first time today, talking about developing with Umbraco for a Chinese market. This was a lightening talk where I discuss some of the challenges of developing Umbraco sites that will be used by people in China, including getting the infamous ICMP License Find out more about our Umbraco work with Pulse Fitness in China.…

This morning I read a post from a Dev Evangelist at Oracle, who wrote about all the talks he is looking forward to at Oracle Code.  It was a great post, but it got me to thinking, there’s so much more to look forward to about Code Garden than just the talks. So here’s the things I’m gong to enjoy at my CG18 experience. My first Gold Partner Summit The summit is the opportunity for all the Umbraco Gold Partners worldwide to get together to learn about the roadmap for the next year, to discuss issues and opportunities and to…

This is an old, old, old article.  But still completely relevant today.  You see, human perception hasn’t evolved substantially since 1993, and so neither have our expectations of the response time of the systems we interact with.  Those systems my have substantially evolved as the web became mainstream, and then smartphone apps became ubiquitous.  But our expectations remain the same.  If the system responds to a users action in under 1 second, then the users flow of thought remains unaffected. Read on... Response Time Limits: Article by Jakob Nielsen.…

I spoke at the Umbraco Poland Festival in Krakow, talking about a case study involving Harwoods Group Intranet which I worked on recently.  In the presentation, I covered some of the business goals, talked about SAML Integration, and the Social Media Curation Tool plugin which we developed for Harwoods. …

Many people will know that the 25th May 2018 is GDPR Day, and the team at Umbraco HQ are busy getting ready.  The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a new regulation that intends to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). At this weeks Gold Partner Webinar Niels and Anders gave a briefing to the Partners to explain the plans currently in place for the toolkit.   The team at HQ has undertaken a detail analysis of the impact of GDPR. Obviously GDPR mainly affects processes for managing data, but HQ are keen…

When poor performance and a lack of scalability impacted the delivery of a marketing led digital campaign for a major financial services client their agency turned to Carbon Six Digital for help. How Carbon Six Digital Offered a Solution  Carbon Six Digital’s intervention stabilised the project preventing further delays to the project, and ensured that the final system met the end-client’s quality criteria and passed all security penetration testing. The code developed as part of this project has since gone on to be used on a number of future projects where the client agency were engaged by the financial services…

To open up access to new markets in China and across Asia, Carbon Six Digital localised a leading UK fitness equipment manufacturer’s fitness technology platform using Umbraco and Amazon Web Services. The last few months at Carbon Six HQ have been pretty busy, as we’ve been putting the finishing touches to really important project for our clients Pulse Fitness. When Pulse decided to expand into the fast growing fitness market in China, we support them by localising PulseMove, their cloud based connected fitness platform of web- and mobile-apps. The project had to launch at the ChinaFit exhibition in Beijing on…