Blog

Social games during a pandemic
How can folks feel like a team during a pandemic? Online games have worked for us.

New version of gauntface.com
An overview of the stack used for the latest version of gauntface.com, which includes Hugo, AWS, GitHub actions, and a Go program.

Continuous Deployment with AWS and GitHub Actions
Continuous deployment with AWS and GitHub Actions is fairly easy to set up and use.

KBWiki Tutorial Notes
These are running notes as I go through the KBWiki tutorial on how to make a custom keyboard.

Crimp Housing for Makers
I would have loved for someone to have told me about crimp housing when I first started playing around with electronics.

Raspberry Pi Over Serial USB on Ubuntu
One of the biggest barriers to working with a Raspberry Pi is working on it from a seperate computer. USB to Serial cables make it easy.

Testing for the Web
Automated testing on the web has some real gnarly gotchas. Time to find out what they are.

Push Debugging & Analytics
How do you add tracking for push messaging and how do you go about debugging push notifications?

Unit Testing a Service Worker
Service workers can lead to some weird behaviours if edge cases are accounted for so how do you test these edge cases?

Start Up Scripts for Raspbian
Raspbian had a update basing itself on Debian Jessie and one change that came with this is a change in the tool used for start up dependencies, this is how I'm now auto-starting a web server on a pi.

Node Unit Testing
I'm no expert, quite the opposite, when it comes to node unit testing. I spent some time trying to figure out how to unit test a new project and here's my rough findings so far.

Raspberry Pi Network
Been having some problems with my Raspberry Pi's Wifi and found two things that seem to have tremendously.

Gulp & Sass
Just been toying with performance of compiling sass - some weird things I've spotted.

Arachnidlabs Minishift and Ubuntu / Pi
The Minishift by Arachnidlabs is this crazy awesome little pixel screen that you can use to display text or what not.

Fetch is the new XHR
Fetch is a simpler way of getting resources in Javascript compared to XHR. This post is just a brain dump of how to use fetch to make requests.

What the Virtual Viewport?
We've heard the term "virtual viewport" get kicked around the office over the past few days and no one knew what it was. Rick Byers to the rescue.

Trying to do a Good Job
Developing sites with backend and front end logic, build processes, preprocessors, what ever else makes it hard to keep things clean and sane. How I've reworked things.

Push Notifications & Service Worker
Service worker is a seriously bad ass API. But what do you do with a bad ass API? Make it totes legit with some push notifications. I promise the article is better than this intro.

DevTools Ideas
Having worked with service worker in Chrome, there are a few areas where I'm at odds with DevTools as to how to get a sane workflow.

What You Need to Know About the WebView in L
The WebView in Lollipop has been updated to M37 and comes with some new API's and alterations to some behaviours. I've noted them down just in case.

Is the Web a Developers Cwtch?
The web is awesome, no doubt about it. But are the very features that make it so powerful, also act as the very thing that holds it back.

Your Guide to SSL on Nginx
Everyone is moving to add SSL support on their site. If you're using Nginx and looking to do the same then this post is for you, walking you through from start to finish on how to add SSL support.

WebP Support with ImageMagick and PHP
This was something I've been meaning to try and figure out one way or the other. WebP has some huge wins for reducing images sizes, so here's my first attempt at getting something up and running.

Raspberry Pi <3 Node
I love Node for it's hackability. While I'm not entirely sure it will work with the electronics on a Pi, it's a safe bet for a quick and dirty web server.

Let's Look at Load Time Performance
After getting my site to a score of 100/100 on PageSpeed Insights, I couldn't help but look into the one little niggle (read issue) I had with the way I achieved the score.