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Articles from Ben Ellerby

Serverless Anything: Using AWS Lambda Layers to build custom runtimes

January 26, 2019Ben 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 PHP infrastructure for a client. PHP is one option…

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Installing Private NPM Packages on AppCenter

July 19, 2018Ben Ellerby1 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 is no mention of how to achieve this in the AppCenter…

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Making Amazon Dash Buttons Useful: By building a doorbell!

February 11, 2018Ben Ellerby2 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 the IOT developer community - but they are not intended for use…

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IOT Provisioning, As A Service: Resin.io

February 10, 2018Ben Ellerby2 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 and getting frustrated by time wasted to getting…

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Building a Google Analytics Funnel from Firebase in React-Native (a simple workaround)

January 15, 2018Ben Ellerby2 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 standard mobile app analytics platform, and there is…

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Building a Trump/Obama Tweet Classifier with 98% accuracy in 1 hour!

November 01, 2017Ben Ellerby2 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 on Machine Learning / Classifier theory, and more…

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Conceptual Modelling in an Agile World: The key to good UX!

February 14, 2017Ben Ellerby4 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 underlying conceptual model of…

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