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 the West Midlands, England. I live with my husband and I’m daddy to a nine-year-old Labrador called Mickey and two growing boys.
Check out About Andy Heathershaw to read more about me, or browse my blog posts below.
Saturday, 11th January, 2020
For my first blog post of 2020, I thought I’d share one of my challenges of being a parent to the boys and a 5-year old Labrador called Mickey: crossing the road.
Our local estate is generally quiet for traffic, so crossing the road is usually uneventful. As you’d expect, there are times we have to wait for a passing car before we can cross. I’m constantly re-enforcing to the boys that they must wait until the road is clear of cars before they cross.
Which means when someone stops and waves us across the road in front of them, whilst it is a kind act, it does irritate me.
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Sunday, 1st September, 2019
It’s 3 years to the day since I made the first commit to what would become Blue Twilight – my open-source PHP photo gallery.
Today I’m delighted to announce the availability of Blue Twilight Cloud.
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Sunday, 24th February, 2019
Google is the registry behind the new .dev TLD – the ultimate vanity domain for developers.
The .dev extension has historically been used by developers fudging their host files to create realistic-looking development environments. Now, .dev is open in Early Access Preview to allow the world to register their .dev domains.
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Sunday, 27th January, 2019
My first post of 2019 is a tutorial that’s all about the cloud.
I’m going to show you how to deploy a PHP application with a MySQL database on a cloud server from UpCloud. I’ll be using the brilliant RunCloud control panel to deploy my PHP photo gallery – Blue Twilight – to an UpCloud server.
My friends over at UpCloud have provided an awesome promo-code for free credit to try out their service. Details at the end of the article.
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Thursday, 25th October, 2018
It’s almost two years since I published the post on the Visual Studio IDE information message: “delegate invocation can be simplified.”
While reviewing some error messages in a new MVC project, I recently learnt something equally as simple and eye-opening.
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Friday, 12th October, 2018
My new hosting provider (blog post on that coming soon!) has notified me of 2 maintenance windows next week:
The first window specifically targets the VPS platform, and will see my server powered down and migrated to new infrastructure.
The second window will see an upgrade to the core network adding additional capacity and DDOS protection.
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Thursday, 26th July, 2018
The Ubuntu team will this week release Ubuntu Server 18.04.1, the first minor revision to 18.04 since its release on April 26th.
Following the release on July 26th*, Ubuntu 16.04 machines everywhere will soon start to get notifications that a new release is available to upgrade to.
In this article, I’ll show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 using the command-line. This can be used on all Ubuntu derivatives, but is mostly aimed at Server installs that do not have a graphical interface.
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Sunday, 1st July, 2018
The new EU data protection legislation, GDPR, mandates that every reasonable effort and technology is used to protect personal data. It even goes as far as specifying encryption. The open-source database MariaDB (a drop-in, compatible replacement for MySQL) has supported “encryption at rest” since version 10.1. Use MariaDB encryption to satisify the GDPR recommendation of using encryption to protect your personal data.
Let’s have a look at what it can do and how you can set it up. You won’t have to make a single change to your website or application!
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Florida is my go-to destination for a holiday. I’ve been several times since our honeymoon in 2012 and yet I still manage to find something new to see or do each time. When I fly into MCO airport and walk through the stunning atrium, I know I’m back in my happy place!
Whether you’ve never been before, or are going for the 20th time, this is a list of the top 10 things to do in Florida that I think will make your visit that little bit more memorable.
(Spoiler alert: Disney features a lot!)
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Wednesday, 11th April, 2018
Ubuntu Server is a Linux distribution that is ideally suited to server workloads. For example: hosting websites and web applications.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to install a LAMP stack – that’s Apache, MariaDB (in place of MySQL) and PHP – on Ubuntu Server using the latest available releases, and how to keep it up-to-date.
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