Ruby on Rails job opportunity
Substrakt are looking for a talented Ruby on Rails developer to join the team full-time. Development work will largely be focussed on exciting new and existing projects in the education and health...
View ArticleKicking-off with Project Art Works
We’ve recently started work on a new website for Project Art Works (PAW), an organisation based in Hastings who do some exceptional work. “Project Art Works is an artist-led organisation. We work with...
View ArticleSketch Review – Switching from Illustrator to Sketch
We’ve been using Sketch for a several months to produce our interface wireframes and designs. As we’ve had time to settle in with the app, I thought I’d jot down my thoughts on the app itself, focusing...
View ArticleWriting code that writes code in Ruby
Ruby is a very powerful language and with its metaprogramming methods, it gets even more powerful. Ruby contains several methods that allow developers to write code that writes code. We call this...
View ArticleDigital Culture report 2015 digested
First things first let me introduce myself, I’m Ash – Substrakt’s new Strategic Director. I’ve been working with arts organisations and in the higher education, media and charity sectors for the past...
View ArticleWordPress, Ansible, DigitalOcean and something about pizzas
Let’s say we run a pizza joint, and we bake a mean calzone. We can tweak that pizza for different customers’ requirements (vegetarians, those with a dairy allergy, or just sensible people who don’t...
View ArticleInteresting things we’ve seen in 2016 #1
Here are a few interesting, useful and beautiful things we’ve seen over the past month. Ansible 2 has launched http://www.ansible.com/blog/ansible-2.0-launch (our Technical Director, Mark has written...
View ArticleAre you a lead PHP developer? Come join us!
£34 – £40k (depending on experience) Based in Birmingham ideally (but will consider London) Monday to Friday, 9 – 5 Substrakt are looking for a talented PHP developer to join the team full-time....
View ArticleUsing Let’s Encrypt to SSLify a site in 10 minutes for free
It’s pretty much a given now that SSL is the future. The internet needs secure communication. Until now, SSL certificates have been expensive and cumbersome to acquire. You can easily put down upwards...
View ArticleEnglish National Opera: A Design Perspective
I recall the debrief with Andy after our successful first meeting with ENO. I was very excited. We all were. I believe the term meisterwerk was used. Back in September when we first started working...
View ArticleMaking lists of logo images less awful
One of the most common design challenges I come across as a designer/developer is the Client/Supporter/Partner list of logos. These innocent lists of logos are perceived to be a simple addition to a...
View ArticleInteresting things we’ve seen in 2016 #2
Let’s start off with a few pretty and/or shiny arts/cultural sites that we’ve seen recently: Norwegian Crafts The Next Rembrandt And a non-arts one too: Parcours Canada Max spotted that someone has...
View ArticleLevelling up!
We are a few months away from our 10-year anniversary as a limited company. Growing a company over the past ten years has not been without its share of challenges. Our focus has been in building and...
View ArticleInteresting things we’ve seen in 2016 #3
The latest in our (semi) regular roundup of Good Things. This is a fairly impressive (and quite bonkers) example of CSS transitions. A few helpful visual tweaks for Sublime. The Queensland Ballet site...
View Articlehas_many association limit in Rails
Imagine you have an Organisation and User model and each Organisation has many Users. However, each Organisation has a maximum number of Users. Using only nice idiomatic Rails, do you enforce this...
View ArticleA hole big enough to fit through
In 2009 I emailed Andy the MD of Substrakt to ask if there was a Steadman-sized hole in his organisation, that I might fit into. I’d come off the back of a trying year, after doing some post-redundancy...
View ArticleHeroku, SSL & Me. We’ve come a long way.
tl;dr: SSL is no longer expensive and complicated. We wrote some code to make it awesome. I’ve said it a few times in the past but SSL is the future. If you’re not encrypting your users’ traffic while...
View ArticleWe need to talk about WordPress
What is WordPress? “WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) built on PHP and MySQL.” We love WordPress, we use it in the majority of our work with arts and cultural...
View ArticleWhat is SSL and why is it important?
In a previous blog post, I explained how we can install SSL on to any site for free using a cool tool we built. This is all well and good, but it missed out a few crucial elements and assumed a lot of...
View ArticleCDNs are Awesome
tl;dr: Content Delivery Networks are great. You should use one. The modern web is full of things like images, scripts, stylesheets. When you download a web page you’re not just downloading as web page,...
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