Throughout my career, I feel like I’ve done a pretty decent job of staying top of new developments in the industry: attending conferences, following (and later befriending!) some of the very smart people writing the specs, being the one sharing news...
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The year in...
...furry friends
...retreating into my cave
...conferences
...gardening
...books
...music
...video games
...blog posts
The year in...
...furry friends
We got a dog! She's both the most wonderful and...
Walking past a bus stop yesterday I saw an advert for Google’s AI search. The person in the ad had pointed their phone’s camera at a bowl of ramen, and the AI result explained how to reproduce it at home.
How does it know? Because it’s trained on all...
I meant to post this in May, but then I went back to work after my final (sob) sabbatical, and I also lost a lot of time to Blue Prince at some point, so here we are in July.
I thought I'd update with some medium-sized news in the form of a...
This is an updated & abridged version of the talk I gave at several conferences throughout 2022/23, including Beyond Tellerrand, CSS Day and FFConf.
If you take just one thing away from this article, I want it to be this: please build your own...
This takes me back to my teenage years, doing Friday Five on my blog and later on the sets of questions on LiveJournal that were known as memes. Thanks Sally for the tag! <3
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
As a teenager I blogged...
You Are Not Meant To Scale - Keith Kurson - “Take a deep breath, and say out loud: I am not a machine, I am not meant to scale. You have a finite amount of energy, and a community of people around you who can use that energy. You can use that energy,...
After 4 (cumulative) years of service at my job in late 2023, I became eligible for a 3-month paid sabbatical (honestly what a perk). My only prior experience of a work sabbatical had been the offer of a 6-month paid sabbatical after 25 years of...
For Christmas 2022, I bought my husband a Steam Deck. It's a handheld games console that runs a version of Linux (so you can also use it as a computer and plug it into a monitor, if you want), and works seamlessly with nearly every game in your...
It’s Boxing Day and I’m a small pile on the sofa. We successfully Did Christmas at ours this year, and I never want to see another mince pie (until next year).
So, what better time than now to look back on the year?
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The...
A roundup of fun things and projects.
TV
I mentioned to my husband that I'd never watched Life on Mars, so we're watching it all the way through, and it's brilliant, obviously. I'm horribly annoying when watching things that have been...
I was very fortunate to speak at another excellent Beyond Tellerrand last week, alongside some brilliant and wonderful people. Once again I was inspired by the variety of topics and messages people shared on the stage. Alongside the usual artists’...
Nic Chan - Nic has just finished rebuilding her website and it’s INCREDIBLE! Seriously just look at it
CSS { In Real Life } | Limitation Breeds Creativity: A Study in Composition with Custom Properties - Michelle has done some (characteristically)...
Those of you who know me (or who have been reading my posts for a while) will know that I'm often at conferences. I tend to speak at around four a year, plus attending one or two on top of that. I also know a great many people who never go to...
I've built a new theme for this site, inspired by my love of gardening as well as one of my favourite video games.
With no pixel artistry skills to speak of, I'm grateful to the various artists over on itch.io, who I've credited on the...
The area element - I’m really enjoying Heydon’s
HTML element safari, from the better-known to the lesser-known. This will certainly fall into the latter camp for a lot of folks!
After an initial burst of blogging energy January followed by a series of automated posts featuring good things I’d read recently, it fell off a cliff towards the end of March. I didn't get bored, I promise!
Life got extremely busy and reading...
A few years back I got so bored of taking attendance for my choir that I wrote a Slack integration to do it for me (I got us on Slack in 2014). That evolved from a dodgy Python app triggered by slash commands into into a neat little Typescript suite...
Heat Death of the Internet - takahē - “The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There...
Say hello to the Mykeyclub MKC75!
It's so pretty! This is going to be my new office keyboard. Weighted aluminium case, so nice and heavy without too much rattle. It's got a rotary encoder (that's a knob to you and me) which controls the...
Mastodon has often been touted as some kind of grassroots utopia compared to the bro-niverse that is Twitter. But in my experience it's exactly the same: full of sanctimonious reply guys.
Before the great Twitter exodus I'd amassed quite a...
First conference of the year is done, and what a conference it was! I begged Josh to let me speak at All Day Hey in 2022, and he promised me a slot in 2024 which at the time seemed forever away. As seems to happen a lot now, I blinked and it was just...
On having no visual memory - Rachel Andrew shares her experiences of what it’s like to have aphantasia.
Why Good Captioned Videos Are Important – Meryl.net home - A really insightful guide to what makes good, accessible video captions. Plain is always...
You’re a Blogger, Not an Essayist - I am BARRY HESS - “You don’t need to labor over your posts. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or spelling. You don’t need to leave a post in draft for seven months, pouring over research. (Though you can if you...
It's rhubarb season! I came home from my parents' last weekend with a large armful of the stuff.
Rhubarb is extremely tart and not very nice on its own unless you drown it in sugar. It's particularly good when paired with very sweet things...
Two years after All Day Hey made me realise I missed the web, I'm really excited to be speaking there myself! I'll be talking about technical migrations – how we recently pulled off a Typescript migration at Monzo, and things you should...
Why I’m Ready to Party Like It’s 1999…Again - Jared White reflects on his early experiences of the web, and suggests maybe we’re ready to do the 90s web again…
This isn't going to be a tech post, mainly because I haven't really been enjoying tech things recently. I spend all day thinking about technical integrations and system architectures and requirements, so I don't really want to do anything...
Some little ways I’m using CSS :has() in the real world - Piccalilli - Some great tips for one of my favourite recent CSS features.
Case Study: lynnandtonic.com 2023 refresh - Lynn’s annual redesigns are a real joy, and this is a fascinating look into...
Tailwind vs Semantic CSS - Found via Andy Bell's site - as he puts it, this post is pretty clearly biased towards semantic CSS but I think it's pretty evident fromt his that bare-bones HTML with "plain old CSS" is a lot more performant...
It's OK to abandon your side-project - Robb Owen - "We hear about all the side-project success stories, but what if we talked more openly about the ones that tanked?"
Robin Rendle — Mini Manifesto - Robin has redone his homepage and it’s...
The Midnight Pub - A tiny forum in the form of a virtual pub. It even has a speakeasy.
This website is personal - Frills - I really identify with this post, and the feeling that my posts aren’t worth anything if they’re not useful in some way. In...
Please, don’t force me to log in - It feels like every website or connected device wants you to sign up before you can use it these days…
It feels like React is getting a bit of a kicking recently - Piccalilli - There's a lot of React criticism...
At university I worked at Manchester Academy, and would often end up behind the bar at all sorts of gigs from pop, to metal, to folk. Metal gigs were always my favourite because the crowd were very nice to bar staff, whereas sometimes you'd have...
Old'aVista - Altavista was my first search engine (or should I say altavista+was+my+first+search+engine) and this is a delightful trip down memory lane.
Inside .git - Legendary explainer of things Julia Evans has written a fascinating and...
This is a dangerous path you're about to walk down. Is your wallet ready?
Whether you prefer the smooth glide of linear switches, the gentle bump of a tactile switch or the full-on audio assault of a clicky switch, there’s something extremely...
Edit 04/02/24 to change the comparator date from midnight on previous Saturday to midnight on previous Sunday to prevent duplicate links being published.
A post that’s been getting a lot of traction recently is I miss human curation by Cassidy...
The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit - Aftermath - How AI-generated content is ruining search engines for everyone.
Exposed RSS - I get sites not having an “RSS” for “Feed” link on their website while actually having an RSS feed. I don’t like it, but I...
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About Neocities
Hosting a static site on Neocities
Continuous deployment to Neocities with Github Actions
Scheduling builds
I’ve hosted this website in a few different places since I started it in 2019. It started...
It occurred to me this week that even though I’ve been using webmentions as comments for a really long time, I hadn’t actually been sending them myself. The shame! Here's how I set it up.
Edit 22/01/23: I've added in some checks to make sure I...
I came across Sara Joy's (very cool) demo of CSS theming without classes today, and looking through the code spotted a couple of elements I hadn't come across before: <progress> and <meter>. Granted, I've probably seen the...
localghost.dev has a new theme! In search of a little project over the merrineum that didn’t require me to learn anything and therefore use my brain, I remembered there was a stylesheet hidden in the themes directory of my website that I hadn’t...
Everything you've ever wanted to know about sound, and things you didn't know you wanted to know but are glad you learned, such as:
why all film trailers sound the same with that deep "booj" noise
how NASA ran live audio from the...
Last year's roundup post was good fun, so I decided I'd do another one this year! I feel like I blinked in April and suddenly it was December.
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The year...
As engineers it can be unclear where we’re heading, especially when we’re heads down writing code all the time. It can be hard to think even a few months ahead. What does an engineering career in a larger organisation look like? What even is a staff...
When I tell people I’m in a choir, some of them imagine the same thing: churches, robes and choral music. Pious singing faces.
(To be clear, I’ve done that kind of choir before and it’s great in its own way, but that’s very much not what goes on in...
I've been making this "Bonfire Brownies" recipe since it was aired on UK children's TV institution Blue Peter in the early 00s, and I maintain it's still the best brownie recipe. Chewy and delicious. I recommend freezing them and...
I scheduled this post, isn't that cute?
I find I have very little energy to write blog posts during the week, but occasionally I sit down on the weekend to write something and have a few ideas that turn into multiple posts. I'd like to be able...
I mentioned recently that I'd built separate RSS feeds for different kinds of posts. Here's how I did it!
I had to do a bit of fiddling to get this working in Eleventy – this is one of the few things I think Hugo actually does in a simpler...
If I need to impress, or bribe people to like me, I make these cookies. A shortcrust pastry/biscuit dough hybrid case with appley-cinnamony goodness inside, packaged in an adorable pie shape.
The process is a little involved, but they're flaky and...
Recently I've been inspired by folks like Michelle Barker and Amy Hupe doing National Blog Posting Month (NaBloPoMo!), and seeing folks writing down little thoughts and things they've encountered. I'm absolutely not doing NaBloPoMo, I am...
I wasn't particularly enthused by the alpha release of Vercel's v0 UI generation tool this week. Provided with a prompt, it produces React code with Tailwind to style it. It's being marketed as a prototyping tool, but was described by...
Michael Hobbes and Peter Shamshiri take us through some of the biggest "self-help"/pseudoscience books from the last few decades and deservedly tear them apart.
Some of the worst relationship books are here – Men Are From Mars, Women Are From...
I had the absolute privilege of opening Beyond Tellerrand Düsseldorf recently. Truth be told, I had no idea what to expect, other than a great conference (from what everyone had told me), but it was incredible! (Apologies to anyone who tried to chat...
I'm not very good at being bad at things. In fact, I have a track record of giving up on things if I'm not immediately good at it. (So I guess I'm good at giving up on things?)
Case in point: the piano. There's an electric piano...
Inspired by Robb Knight I want to build my own /now page. As a teen I used to use PHPCurrently on my personal website to list what I was listening to, thinking, feeling, even what my MSN display picture was. Here's an objectively terrible...
I'm still sad about Twitter.
I think what has emerged for me since switching to Mastodon is an altogether healthier relationship with social media. I'm not checking it constantly and I'm not obsessing over how my tweets are doing. I can...
I don't usually do these end-of-year reflection posts, but at a time where I feel like I'm finally starting to hit flat land again after a year of climbing hills, it seems like a nice thing to do, and a way for me to reflect on my own...
I've been speaking at conferences and meetups on and off for nearly five years now, and a few people have asked me what the process is for preparing a talk. So I thought I'd share how I approach it.
For me, the talk process is a...
Edit May 2023: the Bridgy integration with Twitter no longer works due to Twitter shutting off API access so some functionality won't be working any more!
Note: This is a written version of a talk I gave at State of the Browser 2022 in October...
Three years ago I wrote a post called Everything I googled in a week as a professional software engineer, and it clearly resonated with people, because it went pretty viral. It still gets most of the pageviews on this website.
Well, a lot has changed...
Hey internet! Last time we spoke, I was in a bad place. Burnt out and off work. Well, in May I made the decision to quit my job at the startup after 7 months, and in June I accepted a new job at... my old job. So I'm back at Monzo, working at the...
It's Easter and I'm off work til the end of the month. It was originally just going to be for a few days as I'd used up most of my holiday already, but after I burst into tears at my manager on Wednesday during our 1:1 when he asked me how...
If you're an early-career developer, Twitter is overflowing with people tweeting great tips – and some absolute rubbish – about how to improve your skills and become better at your job. I've spoken to more than a few people who've asked...
I've come across a lot of websites in my career (and in daily browsing) that are straight-up inaccessible. If you've ever worked on a project that is riddled with accessibility issues, you'll know that fixing these problems is a mammoth...
This is a series started by Colin Devroe. Some other lovely folks have written their own, including Sara Soueidan and Cassie Evans.
This post would have looked very different prior to March 2020. Before then, I'd be out at events, meetups or...
I started writing this post a few days ago, and was so exhausted I couldn't actually be bothered to finish it, which tells you a lot really. And if you're too exhausted to read another blog post, here's a summary: have a rest. Go and do...
In an ideal world, being "good at accessibility" wouldn't make you stand out from the crowd. Companies wouldn't be hiring accessibility experts to help them unpick and untangle the inaccessible products they've been building for...
I spent an entire day last week wrestling with a PDF-rendering library in React which was refusing to work in production. Locally it ran just fine, but as soon as we built our app in production mode, it wasn't doing anything. Looking at the...
Now in its 11th year, ffconf is one of the biggest events in the conference calendar for web developers across the UK (and further afield). Yet somehow I've managed to miss every one since I got into tech, because of some reason or another - last...
Update 15/10/2022: I've written a new version of this! Everything I googled in a week as a senior software engineer
In an attempt to dispel the idea that if you have to google stuff you're not a proper engineer, this is a list of nearly...
Tech job interviews are often different flavours of the same thing, regardless of where you apply. Interviewers are likely to ask you questions about your experiences, perhaps a hypothetical question about what you might do in a certain situation, or...
When you're talking about what you're working on, do you ever stop to think about what you're saying and whether the person you're talking to can actually understand it?
There's more to being a software engineer than coding. What...