Weblog

If you work as an independent recruiter or an in-house HR manager, you’re probably inundated with CVs from aspiring job candidates. You’re also probably collecting data from other sources: social media, LinkedIn profiles and your own interview notes. And the more data you collect, the harder it becomes to spot the right candidate for a particular requirement. If that sounds familiar to you, relax. There are better ways of matching… Read More »Build a Searchable CV Database with IBM Bluemix and PHP

At the end of every month, I sit down for a couple of hours to create and send out invoices to my customers. Up until very recently, this involved opening up an invoice template in a word processor, entering the date and invoice number, adding up the hours worked, and calculating the total and any taxes. I’d then export each invoice as a PDF and email it out. As if… Read More »Create and Deliver Invoices Online with IBM Bluemix and PHP

Ever seen an injured stray on the side of the road and wished you could help, but didn’t know who to call? A couple of months ago, I started thinking about how technology could help address this problem. I began to imagine a mobile application which anyone could use to quickly report injured or ill strays to a central database, including photos and GPS locations. This information could then be… Read More »Build a Mobile Web App for Assisting Stray Dogs

Like most people, I send and receive a lot of documents over email, and the vast majority of those are in PDF format. Over the last few months, I’ve been playing with the idea of moving all these documents into a single location and building an application to automatically index them. This would not only make it easier to find a specific one quickly, but also simplify backing things ups.… Read More »Create a Browser-Based PDF Storage and Search Application

I’ve been looking for an excuse to play with MongoLab’s DBaaS for a while…so when I had to choose a database for my latest IBM Bluemix application, MongoDB was first on my list. I like the idea of a document-oriented database as an alternative to the traditional RDBMS, and I was keen to try this in a real-world context. As it turned out, MongoDB’s document-oriented structure was a great fit… Read More »Build a Notepad Application with PHP, MongoDB, and IBM Bluemix

For many people, the Internet of Things is…well, the Next Big Thing. It’s all about using the cloud, real-time data, and new sensor technology to collect, store and analyze information from a wide range of previously-unwired sources: your house, your car, your refrigerator, your pet and so on. While IoT is certainly very exciting, it’s hard to figure out exactly how to get started building IoT applications…especially if you’re a… Read More »Build a PHP App that Uses GPS Data From an IoT Device

Financial data is now more accessible than ever via open APIs. This makes it easy to build Web or mobile applications that let you track your investment portfolio on a minute-by-minute basis (or at least as often as you care to check it). That’s the idea behind my new portfolio tracking application, which lets you create a virtual portfolio of stocks and then shows you the current market value at… Read More »Build and Deploy an Investment Tracking Application in the Cloud with IBM Bluemix

Cloud storage is increasingly popular because it’s cheap and scalable. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) is probably the most well-known, but almost every serious cloud vendor now has a storage offering. Cue my research into IBM Bluemix and its Object Storage service, which lets you attach cloud storage to your Bluemix application. Bluemix’s Object Storage service is based on OpenStack Swift and follows Swift’s three-tier hierarchy for organizing data:… Read More »Build a Photo Storage Service in the Cloud with PHP and IBM Bluemix

I’ve been using IBM Cloud (aka IBM Bluemix) for various projects, but one of the things that often frustrates me is the lack of debug information available. For example, it’s quite common to upload a new PHP application to IBM Cloud and then see a blank page when attempting to access it. The typical reason for this is that there’s a script error somewhere but the buildpack is configured to… Read More »Debugging PHP Errors on IBM Cloud

Google makes a number of APIs available for free – I’ve previously written about the Google Tasks API and the Google+ API. I recently came across another interesting one – the Google Places API. As the name suggests, the Google Places API lets you retrieve information about shops, businesses, and other establishments by location or keyword. The information returned by the API is quite detailed – it includes place names,… Read More »Build and Deploy an ATM Finder App on Bluemix