Blog

I recently experimented with audio visualisation in React on the Twilio blog. While I meant to teach myself more about the web audio API I found that I picked up a few techniques for animating in canvas within a React project. If you’re creating a canvas animation in React then perhaps this will help you too.

Implementing one time passwords in Crystal

Crystal is still a young language, there aren’t a lot of libraries available yet. For some this could be offputting, but for others this is a chance to learn about a language and provide useful tools for those also starting to use it.

Git commands to keep a fork up to date

I’ve seen the following tweet about git making its way around Twitter recently:

Spring clean your dev machine

Development machines can build up such a lot of cruft. Old versions, oudated programs and unused caches litter the hard drive. It’s good to take time once in a while to clean all of this up and free up some space.

Use the web share API easily with web components

I’m a fan of the web share API but I was not happy with my initial implementation of the API. It was all a bit complex for what is a very simple API. I wanted something more declarative and easier to use with a more generic fallback for when the share API was not available.

CSS: select first-of-class with the subsequent sibling combinator

There are a whole bunch of CSS selectors available to web developers, but sometimes there’s still not enough. I found this recently when building the speaking section of my site and wanted to use the non-existent :first-of-class pseudo class to apply some styles.

gzip a file in Ruby

At the start of the year I looked into how to better compress the output of a Jekyll site. I’ll write up the results to that soon. For now, here’s how to gzip a file using Ruby.

Permissions on the web suck

I am a fan of progressive web apps and the powers that they bestow on web developers to build the next generation of applications. We can write web applications that work offline, download large files in the background, send push notifications, and much more. I was so excited about push notifications on the web that I wrote a whole talk about it in 2015 and was fortunate enough to give it in a bunch of places around the world.

Two tests you should run against your Ruby project now

I had the fortune of attending the wonderful Brighton Ruby conference last week. It was full of excellent advice, wisdom and code. There was one talk, however, that urged me to go home and do something straight away to ensure the security and usability of my projects.

Experimenting with the background fetch API

The service worker API is expanding as more ways to use the background dwelling worker emerge. I’ve written before about push notifications and background sync and I recently explored the very new background fetch API. Here’s what I found out about it.