I didn't enjoy stats at school very much. It seemed a very dry subject that involved a lot of tedious calculations and I didn't really see the point. Perhaps if we'd been encouraged to use computers to do the tedious stuff and been given data sets that were more interesting I'd have realised that actually stats can be a very interesting subject.

After reviewing and enjoying The Manga Guide to Relativity, I was excited to be sent a copy of The Manga Guide to Statistics to review. It inspired me to look at statistics again. Perhaps they do have a point, perhaps with some interesting data and a …

Back in November 2010 MailChimp announced their 'One Million Integration Fund'. They were offering pots of money to people using their API to integrate with their product. It was early days for me and my new client working on Pianola, but we both loved MailChimp and thought it could be something that would help us out.

I was also working a lot with Orchard CMS and wanted to use it on this project. As part of building up interest in Pianola while it was being developed we created a sales site using Orchard and we wanted to be able to collect interested people’s email addresses so we could let …

Since December last year I’ve been the lead developer in a start-up making a product called Pianola. Pianola is a web based product to help bridge clubs manage their club and to bring their members a personal way to review their results and interact with the club. This week I’m in Toronto at the North American Bridge Championships demoing Pianola to club managers and members from across the pond.

This has been my first business trip abroad and Toronto is an amazing city. The first thing I’ve learnt is that when travelling for business and when carrying a lot of extra baggage with things like …