ASKEW.NL
Software Consultancy and Concert Photography
Welcome to the site of Askew Software Consultancy and Concert Photography. The former grew from a childhood hobby into a career that has spanned many decades and seen many technologies come and go. Projects have been diverse and been for some very well known household names.
The concert photography grew not just from a passion for music but also for a desire to somehow capture the moment. Any concert goer will have had that moment when they whip out the camera phone to capture that special moment so I suspect that more people now understand why I get such a thrill from photographing a gig than when I first started.
Quantity Converter
I knocked up a little gismo that uses Blazor WebAssembly to convert values between units. It is nothing terribly fancy but it was fairly straightforward to create.
Click here to take a look.
Queens Game
This simple looking game became a lot of fun and so I decided to create a version for myself. The rendering is SVG and I am using Vue with typescript to maintain the state. You can design your own game in design mode or play a few pre-prepared ones and the hint engine can solve pretty much any puzzle.
Click here to take a look.
Renewed web site
It has been long overdue but the website has needed a cleanup for some years. The old site was simply not modern and not compatible with modern mobile devices. But with a busy workload it is going to take time to completely replace the old site.
The modernisation has included moving the hosting into the Azure cloud and implementing a build pipeline based on GitHub, and Azure so that each change is simply pushed into the cloud with little effort. Some parts of the site will open in a new window or tab. I may pull these back in if possible but they are generally meant as separate sites.
Standards
This simple SPA is built on the React framework and hosted on Azure published via GitHub CI/CD actions making releases incredibly simple. The application's build environment also uses Vite and Node.js.
It is still partially under development so feel free to point out any glaring errors. Click here to see the current state of implementation.
Maps using OpenLayers
A long time ago I created a web based application as a demo. That demo needed updating so I've created a newer version that uses updated libraries to demonstrate some of the features of that now out of date web application. You can see the demo here here.
This is using OpenLayers and while it is free, it is also extremely capable.
This version is hosted on Azure but published via a CI/CD pipeline going via GitHub. This is relatively straightforward to configure and makes releasing a new version of the sub domain as simple as a pull request/push to the repo.
Maps using Plotly
Plotly has some great services if you wish to create charts but they also have some basic offerings for mapping too. I'm not going to say they are going to take the mapping world by storm but they do offering basic raster based maps with the possibility to overlay some vector layers.
If you are using Plotly already then possibly using their mapping offering makes some sense but if you are after advanced mapping capabilities then you'll probably want to keep looking.
A very basic example can be seen here
Charting
A large part of a past project was building charts and for that task we used a free web based open source library from Plotly. Their system meant that we could focus more on the important stuff like gathering and processing the data and then could leave the chart rendering to them.
For clarity, I'm not employed by them, I just found their product made achieving the end result so much easier and I like their product. See more here including a demonstration.
Traffic control
The traffic light you set see here was purchased from Cleware in Germany. We then hooked it up to some software that we wrote that monitors the continuous integration build and test system. If those tests fail we'd like the developer whose changes caused the failure to be aware as soon as possible and this seemed like a fun solution to a practical problem.
Playground
The development playground is where I tinker with new ideas for the site. From here I take ideas and include them in the main part of the site and other projects.
Amongst other things I've been messing with CSS styling, implementing CI/CD to make publishing the site easier, and using React to try to clean the code up a little.
On the radar
The technology radar has been created as a visual representation of the expected timeline of new technologies. What you are seeing here is client side (JavaScript) rendering of SVG based on retrieved configuration data (JSON). You can see a working version here. The page is primarily designed for full sized browsers but it will work on a mobile with some restrictions.
This is also hosted on Azure and quickly published via a GitHub hosted CI/CD pipeline.
Who is that guy?
What the guy in the background? That's Steve Hogarth lead singer of only the best band in the world, Marillion. That night, the 29th of November 2011, they were playing the 013 in Tilburg. It is good that the virus is generally behind us and that the band is touring again.
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