Blog

I built a VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode

Over the Easter weekend, a four day weekend characterised by lockdowns all over the world, I decided to use the extra time I had at home to start a new project and learn a new skill. By the end of the weekend I was proud to release my first VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode.

Making a responsive Twitch Embed

I’ve been trying out streaming live code on Twitch which is a lot of fun. I wanted to share on my own site that I was streaming so I have built a page dedicated to it. The page will evolve, but one of the first things I wanted to include on it was an embed of my Twitch stream and chat.

The story of a mildly popular Ruby gem

The list on GitHub of repositories that depend on your repository is scary.

Mistakes I've made treating file paths as strings

Some things you do as a developer can work for you for years, then turn around and bite you when you were least expecting. These are the things that you wish another developer had told you early in your career so you never had to make the mistakes. This post is about one of those things and if you’re reading this, consider it me telling you.

How to find CFPs for developer conferences

So you’ve decided to speak at a developer conference? You have a story you want to share with your peers—how you built something, how you learned something new, how you became a better developer and how everyone else can too—but you need to find a stage on which to share this story.

Testing signed and encrypted cookies in Rails

Recently I’ve been refactoring the tests for a gem I maintain and I needed to test that it sets the right cookies at the right time. But the cookies in use in the gem are signed cookies and that caused a slight hiccup for me. I’d never tested the value in a signed cookie before and it wasn’t immediately obvious what to do.

How not to sort an array in JavaScript

Array sorting is one of those things you don’t spend too long thinking about, until it stops working for you. Recently I was working with array of items in JavaScript that were not sorting at all properly and completely messing up an interface. It took me way too long to work out what went wrong so I wanted to share what happened and why it was so weird.

How to start a Node.js project

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself what I’ve learned and sometimes I write them because someone else shares something and I want to remember that better. This post is one of the latter.

2018 in review

I’ve never been one for writing a review of my year. This year I’ve found myself not only reading, but comparing myself to others’ reviews. I realised that this is not particularly helpful, so decided I’d give myself something to compare myself to at the end of 2019. Thus, here is my first year in review.

Service workers: beware Safari's range request

You’ve implemented a service worker to cache some assets. Everything is working well, your service worker is a success, you’re feeling good. But then…