Blog

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.

Speed up bundle install with this one trick

Did you know bundler can download and install gems in parallel?

Always install Bundler alongside Ruby with rbenv

Here’s a quick tip for anyone who uses rbenv and ruby-build to manage installing and switching Ruby versions.

The web share API

Recently I implemented the web share API for my site as a means of testing it out. If you are using version 55 or above of Chrome on Android then you can see it in action by clicking “share it” at the bottom of this post.

Doing things wrong

I wrote a blog post last week and bits of it were wrong. This is not a retraction of that blog post, I just wanted to share the feedback that I got, the things I changed and some lessons that I learned.

A toast to ES2015 destructuring

I think the ES2015 destructuring syntax is pretty cool. It might not grab the headlines like Promises, Generators or the class syntax, but I find it really useful. It’s also surprisingly detailed when you read into it.