Author Archives: alankent
Progressive Web AMP (summary of AMP Conf 2018 Talk)
At the recent AMP Conf (in AM(P)sterdam of course!) there was an interesting talk titled “Progressive Web AMPs” that explored the merging of AMP and PWA technologies. The following is my summary and interpretation of the Carved.com ecommerce use case presented by WompMobile from this session – any errors in the following are my own! (Note […]
How Fast is Your Site?
Ever wondered how fast is your web site as experienced by customers? From different parts of the world? There are some useful tools around to help! I think everyone in e-commerce knows that site speed matters these days (right?). There are various stats around like you can lose ~50% of visitors on mobile if it […]
Google, ECommerce, and Me!
I am thrilled to announce, as of March 5th, I am joining Google as a Developer Advocate, focussing on the ecommerce space. For me this is a bit of a dream job. There are so many fascinating technologies that Google is working on that are directly applicable to commerce both in the short and long […]
Exploring Jupyter with Machine Learning
Jupyter is an open source platform that lets you mix code (I will use Python here) with Markdown, allowing you develop notebooks that mix both documentation with the output of code. This is popular with data scientists in the machine learning arena as it lets you write down your notes right next to running code. […]
Getting into Machine Learning
I am not a deep machine learning expert. This post is intended for those who wanted to learn more about the practical aspects of machine learning – where is the effort really? This series of posts are my experiences as I explore the space. What is Machine Learning? So what is Machine Learning in practice? […]
Is Machine Learning Good for Small E-Commerce Business?
Machine learning, a part of the broader field of artificial intelligence, uses computers to spot patterns from data. Larger companies like Amazon, Google, Walmart, and eBay use machine learning in multiple areas of their businesses to great effect. But what about small businesses? Can they use machine learning as well? What is Machine Learning Good […]
Faking a Composer Repo
This is just a quick tip. How can you have a project behave like a Composer repository, but where the packages are in subdirectories of a git repository. First, if the package is the only package in the git repository and the composer.json file for the package is in the root directory, composer can reference […]
Why My Microsoft Surface Pro is not an iPad
I got a Microsoft Surface Pro as my new laptop replacement. Why did I go with a Surface? It was light (the same weight as my 12.9” iPad Pro so is good for traveling), has good specs (I have the 16GB RAM model which can drive a high a good resolution monitor), and it can […]
Windows PowerShell, Control-Z, and Kitematic
I quite like Kitematic for Docker. Its marked as “legacy” so it may go away one day, but until then it provides a nice GUI to spin up containers, launch a web browser pointing to your container, and so on. (I use it on Windows.) But there has been one thing bugging me. When I […]
Installing GraphIQL for use with GraphQL in PHP
I was playing with GraphQL (an alternative to REST) recently using a PHP library and was trying to get GraphIQL (note the extra “I”), a web based “IDE” for writing GraphQL queries. This blog post is to save anyone else who stumbles across this post some of the wasted pain I went through. TL;DR: Don’t […]
Alan Kent's Blog 