Welcome to Andy Heathershaw

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.

"Explosions" at Manchester Arena following Ariana Grande concert

A reported 19 concert-goers attending an Ariana Grande gig in Manchester have been killed following an explosion in a foyer area within the arena.

Greater Manchester Police are treating the incident as terrorism.

Miscellaneous Read more


Take That Wonderland 2017

I was lucky enough to have received tickets for the opening night of Take That’s Wonderland 2017 live tour.

The boys played the Genting Arena in Birmingham and were supported by 90s girl group, All Saints.

I’ve been a Take That fan since before the breakup. I’ve supported them since the re-formation, the arrival and departure again of Robbie, and the more recent departure of Jason. I was gutted to have missed out on The Circus tour (regretted not trying to get tickets after seeing the DVD!) so I was extremely excited for Wonderland Live 2017.

Entertainment , Reflections Read more


Simply Remind Me: my first SaaS application

It’s rare for commercial software developers, such as myself, to get to use the software we write. We rely on our users to report problems or suggest new features for the applications we develop.

Therefore when I read about a PHP development framework (Laravel) that looked so interesting I just had to try it out, I came up with the idea of an application where you tell it all the dates that are important to you, and it will send you e-mail or SMS text messages when those dates are coming up.

And so… Simply Remind Me was born.

Simply Remind Me , Software Development Read more


Delegate invocation can be simplified – C#

When you have worked with the same technology day-in, day-out for almost 15 years, it’s easy to miss some of the “under-the-radar” changes that are made without any fan-fare.

This, for me, is one of those in C#.

Software Development Read more


Server maintenance – 1st/2nd November

My hosting company, Memset Ltd., have advised me they will be performing important maintenance work on their Miniserver platform.

This maintenance is to apply critical security patches to the Linux kernel of the physical servers that host the virtual servers like mine – that power this website.

It is taking place between 22:00 GMT on 1st November and 04:00 GMT on 2nd November. My server will be down for 15-30 minutes during this period.

Miscellaneous Read more


Walt Disney World to close for Matthew’s arrival

The Walt Disney World resort announced on Twitter earlier today that it will be closing all theme parks, water parks, golf courses, Disney Springs and the ESPN sports complex for hurricane Matthew’s arrival.

The parks will close at 5pm local time today (Thursday) and will not open at all on Friday.

Disney , Reflections Read more


Sky become the first UK ISP to enable IPv6

Sky – who provide broadband and digital TV services to UK residents and businesses – have recently enabled IPv6 to their consumer broadband customers.

Miscellaneous Read more


OneDrive storage is no longer unlimited

... after some people upload too much.

“Today, storage limits just became a thing of the past with Office 365.”
Julia White, general manager of Office 365 Technical Product Management. 27th October, 2014

Fast forward to November 2015 and storage limits have just become present again.

Software Development Read more


A weekend afternoon in Autumn

It’s getting cold outside, the trees and foliage are turning a different shade of brown or yellow with each passing day and the dark nights are drawing in – Autumn is most definitely here.

Reflections Read more


MariaDB 10.1 is Generally Available

The open-source database fork of MySQL, started by MySQL’s original developer – MariaDB – have certified their latest release of the 10.1 series (10.1.8) as Generally Available.

DevOps , Software Development Read more