I recently had the privilege of being able to install solar on my roof and with that came the need/want to track and monitor lots of information about my solar install and my usage patterns of it. Having recently electrified my home and completely removing gas all together (I plan to write about this too), I wanted to know where I could load shift some of my usage patterns. Another aspect of monitoring was to know my panels were performing at their optimal, and expected, output. Continue reading.

So a while back I created a twitter bot @earthin24 that generates a video of earth, as seen from himawari8 satellite, every day.

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At work my team have recently taken over a golang app. To learn a new language I like to build something that keeps my interest and by the nature of exploring something of interest you tend to cover way more surface area of a language this way.

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I had twitter open the other day and I had to put my phone down and attend to something else, the timeline happened to be on a looping gif video and I noticed when I came back that my phone was still awake and unlocked the fact that video was in view kept the phone awake and this got me thinking about the new playsinline attribute that has been enabled for <video> elements in iOS10 Safari.

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The other day I had to test an API response based on a file having the incorrect Content-Type of a FormData PUT request.

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September 2015 I had the privelage of giving a talk at JSConfEU 2015 in Berlin. My topic was about what the browser actually does to construct your website and show it on the screen. This is a topic I’ve been digging into for a few years now and it was really fun trying to distill it into a ~25 minute talk.

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Just in time for the launch of Modernizr 3 I’ve been working on a beginners course. This is aimed at people who are getting started in web development and want to know how they can use Modernizr in their workflows. I have 5 vouchers to give away that will give you free access to the course! The first 5 people to tweet the course link with the hashtag #modernizr3course will get a voucher link to access the course for free. Continue reading.

If you’re familiar with iOS development you will know that a UITableView is very efficient when displaying a list of data. A simplification of what it does is display enough cells to fill the viewport plus a few more either side. As you scroll it re-uses cells that are now out of the viewport so a list with thousands of items will only ever use a fixed amount of cells. Highly recommend reading The fine art of UITableViews. Now this has certainly been done before in JavaScript, the best known project being infinity.js, but my approach takes an interesting turn, I avoid heavy DOM operations by using flexbox.

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If you’re unfamiliar with LIFX it’s basically a smart wifi enabled led lightbulb. Lifx recently released a Ruby gem to communicate with it and give it instructions. With winter looming in the southern hemisphere and the sun being up for what feels like 4 seconds at that time of year it’s really hard to get up in the morning so I investigated using their gem to simulate a sunrise effect in time with my alarm on my phone.

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60fps scrolling article got quite a few people excited but also a few smart people to point out some flaws in the approach. I was planning to just update the original article but I’ve compiled so much info about this topic that I thought it would be better to do a follow up article and dive into the detail of the techniques that I tried and some solutions to the critiques made about the last technique.

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