Blog

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.

On fixing a favicon

Sometimes open source work is just fixing one tiny thing that bugs you. However, rolling up your sleeves and delving into even the smallest amount of code can lead to surprising results.

Browser dev tools are so full of features it’s hard to keep up. I bet every developer knows a different set of features to each other. I wanted to share a few little tips that I use, that you might not know and that if I don’t write down I might forget.