Posts

Here’s yet another example of what can happen, when you give control over your content to 3rd parties. They put up a pay wall (or the equivalent thereof, you pay with your identity): Medium has decided that their commercial goals are more important than the author’s need to have their audience able to read their content. This is far from a unique case, nor one that is specific to Medium. But, it beautifully illustrates why we need to be in control of our own content on the web. ...

It seems the world is finally waking up to the fact that we have a climate crisis. We owe a great thanks to Greta Thunberg and all the children and young adults that are striking to keep society and governments aware of the crisis. What can we do? I don’t think of myself as a great world citizen and am trying to do better. Here are a couple of things that I think are worth doing in pursuit of that goal. ...

Homebrew Website Club is a growing world-wide network of meetups for everyone who wants to take back their web experience from social media silos, and own their online identities & content, or just want support with blogging! Want to blog more but struggling with: ideas momentum confidence writing skills Join a gathering of like-minded people and get friendly support with writing, creating, and anything to do with using and improving your own website! ...

If you’re giving individual teams (or gods help you, individuals) free reign to make local decisions about infrastructure, you’re hurting yourself globally. It’s freedom, sure. You’re handing developers a ball of chain and padlocks and telling them to feel free to bind themselves to the operational toil that will be with them until the sweet release of grim death. – Dan McKinley in Choose Boring Technology If your work is in creating and maintaining software, you should read this. ...

Learning how to pick your battles is also about learning how to pick your company and pick your boss, because your job really shouldn’t be all or even mostly about battles. Going through this exercise of solving an unowned problem is fun once in a while, but it’s a real drag when you feel like you’re surrounded by such problems, you can’t ignore them, and you’re powerless to fix them. That is a good sign that it’s time to find a new job, preferably somewhere that is more in tune with your way of doing things. Life is so much more fun when you have people around you that you trust to solve problems, even the problems you have a lot of opinions about. ...

Some years ago, when I still lived in Malmö, I bought a Pilen Lyx bicycle. Actually, I ended up buying two. The first one got stolen within the first year, probably by the gang of bicycle thieves that were caught with a van full of stolen, new bicycles within a year. Anyway, my second Pilen Lyx looked like this: I love this bicycle. Of the bicycles I’ve owned, this is my favourite. ...

There is a common misuse of JavaScript’s type coercion that I see in code reviews. It’s the terse use of two exclamation marks to convert a truthy value to a Boolean value. Here’s an example: const someValue = "I like apple pie"; const userLikesPie = !!someValue; // userLikesPie is now `true` I think this is a misuse for two reasons: it obscures intent for people that are not fully aware of JavaScript coercion it is easy to introduce a mistake that can be difficult to detect As for the first point, you could argue that it is the reader’s responsibility to educate themself in order to fully understand the code. However, there isn’t much value in winning that argument if the reader misunderstands the code and introduces new bugs. ...

This post is outdated! This post is referencing Jekyll, Rake and the like, which I no longer use for managing this site. Some links are broken. I'm leaving the post as-is, for posterity. For a while I’ve had a Bootstrap based cv on this site. While it showed that I am capable of writing HTML, it was a pain to edit. As most people will attest to, keeping your cv up to date is one of their least favourite tasks. Adding HTML doesn’t make it any more enjoyable. ...

This was my third time attending the Full Frontal conference, so I thought that this year I should actually take time to write a little blog post about it. I took a week off from work to be fully able to enjoy visiting Brighton and seeing friends. Experience has shown me that in the week around Full Frontal, the city is full of geeks and there is much socialising to do. This year was no exception. ...

While you’re working on your own computer and accessing webapps running on that computer, response times are going to be fast. Most of the day, this is what we want. Working on your local machine, your webapp should be as fast as you can possibly make it. But, for some situations, we need to examine how our application behaves when network connections are suboptimal. On unix based systems there are a multitude of ways to slow down connection speeds of the entire system. Asking on Twitter, I learned that Apple recently released Network Link Conditioner for OSX Lion. ...