Kind: Articles
Traditional long form content: a post with an explicit title and body.
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Smug Interview Moment
Recently, I got to answer a technical interview question with "Coincidentally, I implemented exactly what you're describing two weeks ago. For fun. Can I show you the code and the blog post I wrote to explain my design choices?"
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Scarecrows
As part of the Village Festival, there's a scarecrow competition around my way with a televisual theme. I love that my local community works so hard to carve out an individual identity and personality for itself!
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Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella
I recently read Bored Gay Werewolf by Tony Santorella. I guess it's got a 'werewolf'. It barely feels 'gay'. It certainly left me 'bored', at times. Turns out that it's a very middle-of-the-road story about Gen Z folks growing into their identities, using sexuality and lycanthropy as loosely-fitting framing devices.
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I Wrote the Same Code Six Times!
Could I rock an interview tech-test in a programming language I haven't touched in a decade? I wanted to know, so I found a tech-test... then solved it in six different programming languages in a single sitting.
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The Difference Between Downloading and Streaming
Mostly to make use of an animation I made for a different blog post that hasn't materialised, let me take a moment to explain to you the fundamental technical difference between 'streaming' and 'downloading'. Which won't take long... because there isn't one!
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Google Shared My Phone Number!
When people started calling my personal mobile number with questions about a voluntary organisation I'm involved with, I was confused: we weren't sharing that number. It turns out that Google had decided to take the number I used to verify my identity for Google Business some years prior and start putting it in Google Search results. WTF, Google?
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Dynamic Filters in Pure CSS
CSS is powerful and performant. Let's implement client-side list filtering (with the user's choice of AND and OR modes) in CSS, without a line of JavaScript.
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Avanti's Accessibility Failure
Train provider Avanti's website may be accessible... but their emails, which you need to interact with to USE their website... are not. It's simply not possible to verify your email address if you use a screen reader, and there's no guest checkout option.
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Variable-aspect adaptive-bitrate video... in vanilla HTML?
Thanks to recent browser enhancements, it's possible to show videos of different aspect ratios based on CSS media queries with no JavaScript dependencies. You can even combine it with adaptive bitrate streaming, even on static hosting. Let me show you how.
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Deprecate React
Just to reassure myself that I really can do all the things I say on my CV, I've been looking at tech tests that touch on each of them. I can definitely write React, for example... but... I might question the wisdom of a company that's exclusively recruiting for React skills in their front-end developers...
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Halifax Shared My Credit Agreement!
Today, my partner's husband received a letter, addressed to him, about a change to his credit card agreement. Except the letter wasn't about his credit card... it was about mine! Halifax dun goofed.
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Breakups vs Layoffs
I've had a few breakups, but I've only been made redundant once. There's a surprising overlap between the two! Here, let's put a Venn-Euler diagram together...
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Geocities Live
Geocities.live transforms any web page into a 90s-Geocities-style variant of itself, and it does a surprisingly good (if slightly "samey") job of it. Its take on DanQ.me got me thinking, though: are there things I can learn from 1990s web design and apply to the next generation of my theme?
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ChatGPT beats GeoGuessr
Given nothing more than a screenshot or two of my game screen, from the starting position only, ChatGPT plays GeoGuessr better than I ever could. Apart from cheating at GeoGuessr, what else could this mean? Is this going to be a scary new weapon in the toolkit of Internet stalkers?
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Change Your Star Sign
The star sign associated with my birthday is Capricorn, and I really don't embody any of the typical Capricorn characteristics, so I changed my star sign to Aquarius. And today, I've launched a website to help others change their star signs, too. What will you change yours to?