This domain and all content is a copy of my old website, for historical purposes only.

Matt Wilcox

External Resources

Things I've seen elsewhere that I'd like to refer to in the future; essentially these are 'bookmarks' for myself, which I thought might be good to share.

Timeline

The Juggler: Doing in seconds what took five hours in 1986

28th April 2015, Musing

It took 5hrs to raytrace a simple scene in 1986. Today we can do it in seconds, in a web browser, in JavaScript, on a phone.

How Photography Was Optimized for White Skin Color

28th April 2015, Musing

Something I'm sure many people are not aware of; there's an inherent racial bias in the technical history of photography.

Explaining Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

07th April 2015, Web Development

Brilliant video explaining why and how Diffie-Hellman key exchanges work to secure communication from man-in-the-middle attacks.

Dutch students can live in nursing homes rent-free

07th April 2015, Musing

Genius idea: Dutch students can live in nursing homes rent-free, as long as they keep the residents company.

Raytracing a Black Hole

07th April 2015, Musing

What does a black hole *really* look like? Here's a simulation, and a walkthrough on how it was done.

Taming the asynchronous beast with ES7

16th March 2015, Web Development

ES7 has some fancy new features, among which is a new kind of function, the async function.

PouchDB

16th March 2015, Web Development

A database designed to run on both the browser and server, and sync the two as required. "PouchDB was created to help web developers build applications that work as well offline as they do online."

VIM Cheat Sheet

06th March 2015, Web Development

An excellent cheat sheet for VIM commands.

Google signals the slow death of desktop-only websites

27th February 2015, Web Development

From April 21st, mobile friendly websites will have a significant SEO advantage over old-school sites. Good times.

Animachine

27th February 2015, Web Development

A web based editor for web based animations, currently in Alpha - looks promising!

Cut the mustard revisited

27th February 2015, Web Development

Detecting modern browsers in order to send them enhanced functionality without breaking older, less capable, browsers.

GIT Ignore .io

27th February 2015, Web Development

A site to generate a .gitignore file for your specific needs. Great for stopping those .DS_Store and .Thumbs files from winding up in your projects.

HTTP2 Explained

24th February 2015, Web Development

"http2 explained" describes the protocol HTTP/2 at a technical and protocol level. Background, the protocol, the implementations and the future.

Responsible Social Share Links

24th February 2015, Web Development

Sometimes as a developer we have no choice but to bow to client demands and add those bloody social share widgets to websites. Don't use the official JS versions, they are notorious for loading excessive JS and making page loads very slow. Here's a better way...

Aural UI of the Elements of HTML

24th February 2015, Web Development

How HTML elements are supported by screen readers; ongoing research into how HTML5 attributes and tags are supported by various screen reading software, which are used by people with vision impairments.

Pep Talk from Brandon Sanderson

20th February 2015, Creative Writing

A Pep talk from my favourite author, to authors everywhere. A good read :)

What portable Flash kit should I buy?

20th February 2015, Musing

Solid advice from a pro; should you be a photographer looking for lighting kit with more punch than a speedlite can deliver, you'll want to watch this.

Offline Cookbook

20th February 2015, Web Development

Service Worker still isn't in every browser, but here's how to use it to make your websites about 100% more awesome.

Dev Docs, Offline

20th February 2015, Web Development

Smart web-page full of developer documentation, that can also be accessed when offline. The future is here, and it's wonderful.

Audio visualisation with the web audio API

16th February 2015, Web Development

Very clever stuff; fancy in-page animations that respond to music you play.

SVGOMG!

16th February 2015, Web Development

An online, service-worker enabled, offline capable, SVG optimisation tool.

How Flexbox is Becoming an Invaluable Tool in my Real World CSS Toolkit

12th February 2015, Web Development

Stephen Greig explains some practical real-world use cases for Flexbox along with example code. Useful.

Eyesight Simulator

08th February 2015, Musing

Ever wanted to show your perfect-sighted friends how you really see the world? Enter your prescription here and then they'll know! Incidentally: here's how I see things; only I'm also colour blind!

KeyMouse

06th February 2015, Web Development

A new design of input peripheral that combines a split keyboard and mouse - looks very interesting; as long as you can touch-type.

Shell Check

05th February 2015, Web Development

If you're writing shell scripts then running them through this checker might be a neat idea; it'll help find bugs.

CoreOS

05th February 2015, Web Development

CoreOS is another Linux distrobution aiming to re-imagine the way packages are managed and installed. It, much like nixOS, seems very interesting.

NixOS

05th February 2015, Web Development

NixOS has a completely declarative approach to configuration management: you write a specification of the desired configuration of your system in NixOS's modular language, and NixOS takes care of making it happen.

Development Environments with Vagrant, Docker, and Supervisord

05th February 2015, Web Development

How to build a lightweight virtual machine for development purposes.

RethinkDB

05th February 2015, Web Development

Another Open Source distributed database. This one's pretty new and aims to take the best parts from MongoDB, Riak, CouchDB and others, while adding its own ideas in there too.

Let's Encrypt

05th February 2015, Web Development

Getting an SSL certificate is a monumental pain, and costly; Let's Encrypt aims to be free, automated, and open. A certificate authority aiming to make https far easier to implement.

How to use npm as a build tool

05th February 2015, Web Development

Build tools are appearing all over the place; Grunt and Gulp to name but two. Apparently, you could just use npm instead...

Rainy Cafe

05th February 2015, Musing

Need to relax or focus? Music not good for that? Here's the ambient sound of a Cafe in the rain. I love this.

Writing Excuses

05th February 2015, Creative Writing

A podcast that's 15min long, comprised of a number of top authors, giving advice on writing.

Essential JavaScript Links

05th February 2015, Web Development

If you're not sure where to start or where to go next with JavaScript, this list is a decent place to look.

Gogs

05th February 2015, Web Development

A self hosted Git service written in Go. Essentially seems to be a GitHub clone you can run yourself on your own infrastructure.