Blog

A few years ago I came across this bookmarklet that removes sticky elements from a webpage. If you're bothered by sticky headers/footers/sidebars taking up screen space and following you down the page, you click the bookmarklet to remove them and restore some calm 🧘‍♂️ Read More

I've been scribbling notes to myself as a macOS newcomer that might be helpful for anyone else coming from Linux. Read More

Old tech is great tech. In this post I enthuse about ditching social media and going back to using RSS for content discovery like in the (g)olden days of the internet 🧓 Read More

This post outlines the steps I took to install Ubuntu in WSL on Windows 11, configure Git and Docker, and connect everything to VS Code for a seamless local development experience. Read More

One of my favourite PlayStation 5 features is the ability to stream games to other devices. Linux isn't officially supported for Remote Play, but I've been using an open source client that works well with a little configuration. Here's what I did to get it set up and streaming smoothly on Ubuntu 22.04. Read More

A few months ago I read the excellent 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, and one of the tips I put in to practice right away was to start keeping an engineering daybook. Read More

About a year ago I was promoted from Developer to Tech Lead, and now feels like a good time to take a moment to reflect on what I've learned so far. Here are the 3 main things I've taken away from my first year in the role. Read More

In this post I'll show you how to use CSS variables to provide light and dark themes for your websites and apps that are applied automatically depending on the user's preference. Read More

Ubuntu 20.04 was released on 23 April, and it looks really good. I decided to upgrade my home laptop, and this post is a little summary of how I've gotten on with the new OS. Read More

Following a role change at work I have rather a lot more stuff to keep track of now, and my new responsibilities quickly outgrew my previous note-taking setup of plain markdown files in a notes folder. I began looking for a free, open source software solution... Read More

Recently I've been trying to reduce my dependence on proprietary apps and services. At first I just wanted a self-hosted alternative to Dropbox, but I quickly found I could build an entire private cloud using Nextcloud, and replace a lot of the services I used to rely on Google for. Read More

I recently decided to migrate my website from WordPress to a set of completely static pages, and settled on Jekyll for managing my site content. Read More

The term progressive web app (PWA) doesn't necessarily describe an app at all - it's really a label that can be applied to any website that implements a particular set of technologies. Making your site a PWA has a lot of benefits, and can even be a better choice than building a dedicated mobile app for Android or iOS. Read More

I've been actively reducing the time I spend on Twitter lately after noticing that more often than not it leaves me feeling sad, frustrated, or even angry. I joined years ago to keep up with tech news, network with other web developers, and share articles and tips. Twitter has undergone a lot of changes in the time I've been using it, and I've found a tech-centric Mastodon instance that's a much more pleasant venue for the kinds of discussions and link-sharing that I initially signed up to Twitter for, so I've been using that instead. Read More

If you walk in to a high street store and tell them you're looking for a laptop that's fast, built to last, and your budget is around the £200 mark, you'll probably give the salespeople a good chuckle. Conventional wisdom is that when buying laptops, you either spend big on a Macbook or a similarly top of the line ultrabook, or you spend somewhere around £500 - £600 on something that feels a bit cheap and plasticky, but gets the job done. In the £200 range and below, you have either Chromebooks (which might be a bit restrictive depending on what you want to do with them), or utter junk. I recently discovered there's a better way though, and I'm a total convert to the used ThinkPad way from now on. Read More

I've previously written about using picture and WebP to dramatically reduce the weight of your pages, but if all your assets are PNG or JPG you might need a way to generate WebP images from them. Read More

It used to be that strong security was only considered a necessity for e-commerce sites, or sites handling sensitive personal information - but that perception is rapidly changing. Read More

At a recent Bristol Web Performance meetup Bruce Lawson gave a talk on responsive image techniques using the picture element he devised and had added to the HTML spec with help from some other clever people. Read More