Admiral
Edgecase

When Microsoft launched its new browser, Edge, in 2015, we wanted web developers to test their sites in it. A scanning tool on a web page was never going to draw a crowd at a conference, so I pitched a machine.

Admiral Edgecase was a seven-foot cabinet of copper cladding, brass studs, green felt, leather and Edison bulbs. You typed your web address on a chunky old IBM keyboard and it went to work: dials, lights, a plasma ball and a burst of smoke, while Raspberry Pis and Arduinos checked your site for the habits that break it in a modern browser, from browser sniffing to out-of-date libraries and plugins. Then it printed your results on a till receipt.

I came up with the concept, pitched it and got the funding. The build was a five-day hack in the basement of the Microsoft campus in Reading, with the brilliant team at We Make Awesome Sh and Anna Fear on the Microsoft side. A GoPro caught most of it, one frame every ten seconds.

It travelled to events for months afterwards, NDC London among them. For the Stacked conference, where I presented the project, Lilian Kasem and Joni Collinge built a cardboard desktop version, the Micro Edge Case, so the idea could go where a seven-foot cabinet couldn't.

It taught me something I still use. When I pitched it, people struggled to picture it. When I showed it, they got it straight away. Not everyone has creative or technical vision, so make it visual.