June 02, 2018

For a very long time the web was static. It was plain text, some images, and not much else. We could do some great things with just text and images, but ultimately it wasn't that exciting and developers wanted more. So browsers added JavaScript, and…

February 26, 2018

Recently my Mac blew up. Only figuratively speaking, but it was enough of a problem that it’s dead and not coming back. Consequently I’ve abandoned writing software on a local machine for the time being, at least until Apple update the Macbook Pro…

February 24, 2018

Front end development is becoming increasingly complicated. The proliferation of frameworks, bundlers, cli tools, and browser APIs abstracted into libraries that give web pages the ability to do amazing and wonderful things are incredible, but they…

October 14, 2017

There are only two ways reduce the size of your code. You can compress it or you can remove it. In general compression is easier, and most modern web building tools will do the job for you. A basic Webpack setup using webpack-uglify can do a pretty…

September 17, 2017

If you want to write a blog then you need a way of building pages, rendering content, and publishing everything to the web. There are a lot of different blogging platforms from fully hosted Software As A Service applications to incredibly simple…

September 03, 2017

A fundamental part of any React application is the way the page is orchestrated using a collection of components. Getting components right is a vital part of any successful React project. The first thing to understand about a React component is that…

September 02, 2017

React is a great framework that does some really impressive things, but I found my first experience of it painful to set up. I wasn't particularly familiar with the React toolchain. Getting Webpack and Babel working nicely was hard enough, but…

September 01, 2017

I built my first website in September of 1997. It was my homepage. It was literally a home page because it lived in my /~ta6cne directory on my university's engineering school email and web server, my home directory. I don't have a copy of it any…