Blog

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.

Git back to the future

Git may be the best version control software I’ve used but it is a complex beast and makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Recently, however, I learned of one way that you can unshoot yourself and potentially save yourself hours of lost work.

A community offers to help

Last week I was blown away by the response to a problem I was experiencing from maintainers of two of the larger open source projects in the Ruby world. And not just your average large Ruby projects, but implementations of Ruby itself.

Install a service worker declaratively

There’s been some interesting updates in service workers recently. The big news is that the Microsoft Edge development version now has service workers, alongside push notifications and background sync, behind flags. There was a new feature that caught my eye though; a declarative method for registering service workers.

August is iOS month

June saw me ask for your help as I started to learn Swift. July was busy with travel. Now August is iOS month.

Creating an asset pipeline with Jekyll-Assets

When I started again on this site, I wanted to make sure it was going to load fast. Performance matters.

Critique my Swift on Exercism

I am currently in the middle of a Swift and iOS course with the excellent Big Nerd Ranch. Taking a week to dedicate to learning a new language and framework means I can block out all other distractions and really focus. And as this goes on, I’d like your help.

Building up and sending an Ajax request is so much easier than it ever used to be. No longer must we hassle ourselves with XMLHttpRequest, never mind the horror of ActiveX’s ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP"). The Fetch API is here (and it is polyfilled for older browsers). Then there’s the FormData object that makes building up and submitting form data really easy, especially compared to the 130 or so lines of JavaScript you’d need to do it yourself.

No running site is ever completely finished. This one is no exception.