Ross Wintle
Ross Wintle
Hi, I’m Ross. I’m a mid-forties, multi-disciplinary geek from Swindon, UK. I’m currently employed as a full-stack web developer working with PHP, WordPress, JavaScript, and React. I’ve previously worked as a freelance software developer who used technology to help people solve problems and to do good – frequently working with charities, non-profits and small businesses. I use WordPress, Laravel and other web tech to build websites and web-based applications.
August 2026
October 2026
Top Words
- turbo
- admin
- apps
- person
- social
- tick
- life
All posts (24)
I can’t lie. I’ve been focussing a lot on the vast piles of negative stuff that surround us more than I should. I’ve been thinking about politics and wars and climate change and heatwaves and El Niño and energy security. I’ve been thinking about friends and family who are different levels of ill and elderly, and who...
I love a good habit tracker. I’ve been using the habit tracking built into TickTick for ages now. But recently HabitKit appeared and it’s very pretty and brilliantly easy to use. But it’s expensive – I appreciate the effort put into these things, but I don’t see THAT much value in them. Then, a few weeks ago, I came...
There’s a ton of information on the internet about baking sourdough. Some present the process as simple, when it’s not. Others make it intensely complicated and nerdy. Some will say that making a nice loaf requires great precision in timing and ingredients. But my process seems pretty robust to my frequent neglect...
I literally had to stop what I was doing and write about this immediately. This is a nerdy, programming language thing, but it’s a thing that made me smile and filled me with hope. I first heard about the Zig Programming Language years ago. But I’m a very cautious adopter of new tech so it just sat there as “a thing...
Back in March I wrote about picking up Turbo Admin development again. And despite a few months passing, I wasn’t kidding! Product work is hard – you need to do way more than just build the product. And I’m choosing to avoid AI. Some may say that makes me slow. I say I enjoy my craft and I think you get a better...
I think that there is an equivalent of the good/quick/cheap job triangle, but for written communication. It’s the precise/succinct/simple triangle. Perhaps (in most cases) you can only have two of these at any time – it’s a trade off we make when choosing how to communicate. But perhaps there is a way to work around...
After a short pause while things were busy, I’ll finally have time to put into developing Turbo Admin again. Hooray! (For those that don’t know, Turbo Admin is my magical WordPress browser extension that adds a command palette and other admin features to the WordPress Dashboard on any site that you log in to.) A...
While I’m making recommendations and shilling other people’s products and generally turning into some weird kind of lifestyle blogger, allow me to talk about my tiny keyboard. You see, there was an iOS-only app called Zeitgeist, which I took ideas from and turned into my micro-journalling app YouSky. But it only...
I made a big, long, technical post a short time back about building a 1-person “social network” app. This is a short post explaining what it is without all the technical details. A short time ago I made a 1-person, Twitter-like social networking app. Weird? Well, maybe. But I’ve found it really useful. I like to...
I have pretty consistently used TickTick for years now. It’s really good. But no one talks about it! It’s a thing, right? You either try all the todo apps and change every few months. Or, if you are a developer, you write your own. But I want to write about TickTick. I heard about TickTick via word of mouth, and...
I’ve recently observed that the washing-up sponges we use seem to be starting to fall apart faster. I don’t know if this is a real thing or not. In any case, it got me a little bit annoyed that surely loads of micro-plastics must be going everywhere. Perhaps even remaining on our crockery and cutlery. It’s a tiny...
Yes, despite being an AI doom-speaker, I tried using a app-builder to make a simple, social-media-like, private, journalling web app. You can see it at https://yousky.veryuseful.app/. This post explains what I did and why, and outlines the development process I took, including the point at which I decided the AI...
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