Welcome to the personal website and blog of software developer – Andy Heathershaw.
I’m a commercial Microsoft .NET developer and open-source PHP developer based in Tamworth, England. I live with my husband and I’m daddy to a seven-year-old Labrador called Mickey and two young boys.
Check out About Andy Heathershaw to read more about me, or browse my blog posts below.
Monday, 9th April, 2018
A year to the day before the UK leaves the EU, the European Commission announced that all .eu domains registered to a UK address would be dropped.
Horrified at the thought of losing my andys.eu domain name (and with it, my primary email address of 8 years) I tweeted out to EURid – the organisation that manages .eu domain names.
Sunday, 1st April, 2018
There are several scenarios in which you may want to redirect all your website visitors to a single, primary domain in Apache:
I have recently implemented the following on my own website, and I would like to share this Apache trick.
Software Development, DevOps Read more
Saturday, 10th February, 2018
It’s the year 2018 and it’s impossible for a software developer to
have not heard about (or used) Github, or a variant like Bitbucket. Even
self-hosted Git evangelist GitLab is a popular choice.
At the start of February 2018, I provisioned a new Cloud VPS to run my website and other apps. I also chose to migrate all my private Git repositories to it and cancelled my paid Github subscription.
This article explores the reasons why I went self-hosted.
Software Development, DevOps Read more
Sunday, 21st January, 2018
2017 was an exciting year for the bigger players in the cloud hosting arena.
With all these improvements in cloud hosting, I thought it would be interesting to focus on a key metric of hosting providers that many overlook: network speed.
Most modern cloud hosting providers give your dedicated server or VPS a 100Mbps or 1Gbps network connection. But how close can you actually get to that speed?
Software Development Read more
Monday, 27th November, 2017
Content Delivery Networks were created for one reason: to speed up your websites and web applications. In this article, I explore how you can take advantage of Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to improve your website performance for a small cost.
Software Development Read more
Thursday, 28th September, 2017
Earlier this week, I couldn’t sleep. So I did what I normally do when I can’t sleep – I watch music videos on YouTube.
The first video in my “here’s what YouTube wants you to watch” list caught my eye. I immediately thought I had missed a piece of new music from one of my favourite artists of the last 10 years: Chris Daughtry.
Reflections, Entertainment Read more
Tuesday, 12th September, 2017
Buying the new iPhone that Apple will announce today? Interested in photography?
Did you know that you can capture a photo and upload it straight into your Blue Twilight photo gallery directly from your new iPhone or iPad device.
Software Development Read more
Wednesday, 2nd August, 2017
My second post in a series of articles about James and my adoption journey is our experience of the first day of "prep group training."
A few days ago we turned up at the Halesowen Barnardo’s office for day 1 of three days of prep group training – a course that’s designed to provide the information, explanation and tools we will need as adoptive parents – not just to get through the adoption journey, but for the life of our future children.
Tuesday, 1st August, 2017
This series of posts is an insight into the world of adoption from the viewpoint of a same-sex, male couple. I decided to publish our story for a number of reasons: 1) because I’m a private individual and rather than talk to people, sometimes it’s easier to put it into writing. 2) to help others who are thinking about going through the process, and 3) so we have something written down to show our future children how they came into our lives.
This is the first in hopefully a number of posts charting our journey.
Sunday, 23rd July, 2017
After I finish work on a Friday, I like to reflect on the week that’s been. Whether it’s in the car on the way home, or with a glass of wine later in the evening, I think about what we* did well, what we could do better – and what was just a complete disaster.
This week has been a rollercoaster at complete opposites of the scale.