Tim Perry

Federate your content just one more step, all by yourself, and making jumping ship a little less scary.

Mastodon has been quietly building popularity for a good few months now, but over the past 48 hours it’s really burst to life, leaping from 25,000 to 40,000+ users in no time at all.

This is an exciting good thing: we’ve been in desperate need of less centralized and walled social networks for a good long time now.

Moving on from Twitter though isn’t easy, as many of us have been there many years...

Because sometimes you want to know if they actually work.

Bash scripts are unloved and underappreciated. Many of us developers spend a lot of time on the command line, and a good shell script is an incredibly powerful thing to drop into & extend your existing workflow.

Shell scripting isn’t easy though. Many of the tools and techniques you might be used to aren’t nearly as effective or well-used on the command line. Testing is a good example: in most languages, there’s a clearly agreed basic a...

CSS-only tabs are a fun topic, and :target is a delightfully elegant declarative approach, except for the bit where it doesn’t work. The #hash links involved jump you around the page by default, and disabling that jumping breaks :target in your CSS, due to poorly defined behaviour in the spec, and corresponding bugs in every browser.

Or so we thought. Turns out there is a way to make this work almost perfectly, despite these bugs, and get perfect CSS-only accessible linkable history-tracking tabs ...

Building a Server-Rendered Map Component

Part 2: How to use client-side libraries like Leaflet, in Node.

As discussed in Part One: Why?, it’d be really useful to be able to take an interesting UI component like a map, and pre-render it on the server as a web component, using Server Components.

We don’t want to do the hard mapping ourselves though. Really, we’d like this to be just as easy as building a client-side UI component. We’d like to use a shiny mapping library, like Leaflet, to give us all ...

Get easy confidence on exactly what you’re committing.

Git Confirm is a git hook, which asks you to confirm when you commit a change that includes additions from a (configurable) list of risky matches. Think ‘TODO’, ‘FIXME’, ‘@Ignore’, ‘describe.skip/it.skip’ and ‘describe.only/it.only’. You can drop Git Confirm in, and effortlessly stop yourself ever committing anything like this by accident.

TODO is the easiest example. It’s really useful to sprinkle TODO comments in your code as you work, to ma...