Writing
The occasional longer piece.
- 18 Oct 2019
Git commit messages
A recent post from David Thompson, My favourite Git Commit, hit the top of Hacker News today and I thought I should jot down a few thoughts. When working on a small project alone, the...
- 14 Oct 2019
Infrequent Miscellany #3
This time: Flash, email, deep work & nuclear weapons. Flash is responsible for the internet's most creative era 🔗 Flash may well be dead but it had a good run and was responsible for some...
- 9 Oct 2019
URL ABC Updated
While trying to recover some of my long-lost posts from the Internet Archive I was reminded of this idea from Tim Van Damme. I figured being almost 10 years since I posted that it would...
- 22 Sep 2019
Infrequent Miscellany #2
This time: Postgres deep dive, tech stack, HTML attributes, machine learning and 21/9. How Postgres Makes Transactions Atomic 🔗 A very detailed (including a break down of the source code!) writeup of how PostgreSQL maintains...
- 11 Sep 2019
Infrequent Miscellany #1
This time: HTML email, Basecamp's development processes, chiptunes and DeepFakes. HTML email client feature support tables 🔗 If you need to find out if a given HTML element, CSS property or JavaScript feature is supported...
- 9 Sep 2019
Introducing Infrequent Miscellany
It's been a while since I've written regularly. To attempt to get back in to the habit I'm launching Infrequent Miscellany, an occasional digest of the latest interesting, weird and/or funny technology developments. I'll try...
- 10 Jun 2016
Basic testing for mobile devices in a desktop browser
My browser of choice for development is Google’s Chrome Canary, a very frequently updated bleeding edge build of Chrome allowing you to preview upcoming features. One feature that I’ve been very fond of since its...
- 7 Aug 2015
Track traffic exiting your site, without jQuery
A few years ago (well, over five years ago!) I published an article that showed you how to use Google Analytics to track traffic exiting your site with a little bit of jQuery. Now while...
- 25 Jan 2015
Building WordStream
Last week I spent a couple of hours playing with some new technology and built wordstream, a real-time word cloud generated from the twitter sample stream. Here's how. The twitter streaming APIs are a very...
- 1 Sep 2014
My Favorite Ruby gems
Many tasks that would otherwise take hours or days to build can be easily implemented by simply including the relevant Ruby Gem in your project. Here’s my pick of interesting, useful and most-importantly time-saving gems:...