Articles from Ben Ellerby
Serverless Anything: Using AWS Lambda Layers to build custom runtimes
Ben Ellerby4 min read
Late in 2018 AWS released Lambda Layers and custom runtime support. This means that to run unsupported runtimes you no longer need to 'hack' around with VMs, docker or using node.js to `exec` your binary. Recently I needed to setup a 100% serverless…
Continue reading →Installing Private NPM Packages on AppCenter
Ben Ellerby2 min read
AppCenter is a great CI platform for Mobile Apps. At Theodo we use it as the standard tool for our react-native projects. In a recent project, we needed to have a shared NPM package between the React and React-Native applications. There…
Continue reading →Making Amazon Dash Buttons Useful: By building a doorbell!
Ben Ellerby3 min read
A few years ago Amazon came out with the Amazon Dash Button, a small internet connected button that can be used to reorder common household items. Such a small, cheap and well-made internet connected button seems like a godsend for…
Continue reading →IOT Provisioning, As A Service: Resin.io
Ben Ellerby4 min read
An IOT Container Engine When preparing a company-wide IOT(Internet of Things) hackathon I wanted to ensure all the Raspberry Pi devices we planned to use were ready for people to throw code at without needing monitors, keyboards, setting up ssh keys…
Continue reading →Building a Google Analytics Funnel from Firebase in React-Native (a simple workaround)
Ben Ellerby3 min read
Google Analytics funnels are a standard way to monitor conversion on a typical purchase flow (e.g. buying a book on an ecommerce site, subscribing to an online service or taking out an insurance policy). Google have moved to have Firebase as their…
Continue reading →Building a Trump/Obama Tweet Classifier with 98% accuracy in 1 hour!
Ben Ellerby3 min read
This is a running blog written during my attempt to build a Trump-Obama tweet classifier in under an hour, providing a quick guide to text classification using a Naive Bayesian approach without ‘recoding the wheel’. Note: This is less a tutorial…
Continue reading →Conceptual Modelling in an Agile World: The key to good UX!
Ben Ellerby6 min read
Modelling is a widely used tool in Computer Science, but often only thought about from a programming, architecture or requirements gathering perspective. There is a large amount of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research that shows the importance of modelling the…
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