In my free time I love to read, write, and shoot amateur photography. I play with the occasional Arduino & Raspberry Pi project, and get a kick out of traditional hand-tool woodwork.
I'm lead developer at View Creative Agency. My job is to help make beautiful websites that perform well for both our clients and their audience.
My role includes project assessment and planning; system and server management; building HTML, CSS, and JS powered front-ends; the occasional CMS integration; and helping develop our team into a force to be reckoned with. It's rewarding and fun stuff.
I've been a full-time web developer since 2004, and a keen hobbyist before that. I've been a member of the HTML Working Group and Responsive Images Community Group. If you've heard of me before it's likely because you've also heard of Adaptive Images; an old but still useful project of mine.
Web Development
It's my job and still a passion; articles, tutorials, notes, and resources exploring web development are all contained here.
Musing
My thoughts on all manner of topics - if I find something thought provoking it'll end up here.
Creative Writing
I love reading and writing; this is a section for me to practice and develop my creative writing skills.
Web Developer Orientation
A resource for people new to web-development or wishing to expand their skills. Offering a broad overview of the field, simple introduction to related topics, and pointers for further learning.
External Resources
Things I've seen elsewhere that I'd like to refer to in the future; I thought these links might be good to share.
Timeline:
N.b., Timeline excludes External Resource posts:
VueJS and Progressive Enhancement
Using VueJS to replace existing functional HTML with an enhanced Vue component, only when JS is available... is a lot easier than I realised.
The ineffectiveness of lonely icons
If your target audience is a general population, you should not be using icons alone to convey anything meaningful. By doing so, you have made assumptions that are unlikely to be appropriate to a general audience.
A political note...
Summarising what I've been saying for years, and to record as another "told you so" for later reference.
The New Web Development
A paradigm shift in Web Development is underway, as exciting as it is intimidating. For traditional web developers who played it safe over the last few years, the time to re-assess the landscape has long since arrived...
2018 in review
Things might be starting to look up...
The cost of developing and adopting new CSS features
There's a non-zero cost to implementing new CSS features, and you need to decide when you can pay it.
Explaining Brexit to my grown nephew and neice
How it'll go down, when they're older...
2016 in review
And I thought 2015 was bad
Should vs Want
A blog post from some months ago, which I never published. Here it is, finally published.
Dissertation Research
We had a work placement a few weeks ago that asked some questions for their dissertation research. I answered. I miss thinking this sort of stuff :/ I'd happily go back to full time education, if I didn't have to worry about that whole "paying bills and life" thing.
Why I probably won't use Resource Hints' pre-fetch and pre-load directives
The biggest trend and problem of the last few years is ever bigger web pages wasting ever more bandwidth. And we're given tools to load more crap based on a guess as to what the user might want to do next?
Britain First
The bits of Britain we should be proud of are the bits where we showed great compassion and commitment.
Two of my favourite companies keep making mistakes
Apple and Twitter are by many measures very successful. But in my opinion both companies are floundering at the moment; Twitter very obviously, and Apple is struggling to find places for future growth.
2016
A quick look at what I hope to achieve in 2016
On a personal note...
Those 'end of year' review posts people sometimes make? Think of this as an early one of those.
UK Government, encryption, and you
The government is intending to eradicate privacy from all its citizens. Many members of the government are likely too ignorant of the actual ramifications of this 'technical stuff' to realise the magnitude of the problem.
Responsive and Accessible 'Read more...' links
My trick for creating 'read more' links that work well for everyone.
Earthbound
Writing Prompt: Due to overpopulation, your parents' generation has been living abroad a self sustained space station for the past few decades. Born and raised on the station, write about your first ever trip to earth. (via Reddit)
Improving Twitter for users
The number one thing they could do to reduce Twitter fatigue: Allow people to show only friends, or friends-of-friends, in your timeline.
The infuriating ineptitude of politics in the UK
Today’s politics is awash with policies which chase the ignorant vote. Because that’s the easiest vote to get, and education is hard and expensive.