2019 November 6th

React Advanced London going deep! Here's my recollection of my attendance at React Advanced London 2019 supported with videos from the event. Ken Wheeler - React Performance Ken's keynote didn't disappoint! Ken talks about how performance fixes aren…

2019 October 31st

I have been a Gatsby user since around v0 May 2017 , at that time was using a template called Lumen and it was just what I needed at the time. Since then I have have gone from using a template to creating my blog. Over the years I have made my own…

2019 July 19th

I've been wanting to go to a JAMstack conf since the first one was scheduled for October 2018. This year when it was announced there would be one in London I was super excited to get the opportunity to go. The conference was across two days with the…

2019 April 9th

In this guide we're going to cover converting the Gatsby default blog starter to use MDX. All the cool kids are using Gatsby and MDX in their blogs these days. If you already have a blog that uses Gatsby but want to move onto the new hotness then…

2019 April 1st

Already use WSL with Ubuntu? Want an Upgrade?? This is a guide that will cover upgrading Windows Subsystem Linux (WSL) from the current LTS version to the latest 'normal' version 18.10. I found this post on dev.to this weekend detailing going from…

2019 March 24th

Hooks ahoy! Ok, let's get it on with the new hotness in Reactland, React Hooks! This is a guide covering using the Gatsby custom React hook for StaticQuery which it is now replacing with useStaticQuery . If you haven't used Gatsby before…

2019 March 9th

Moving to the new hotness!! I've now moved this blog over to Gatsby MDX. You can see all the changes on my repo here . From the pull I'm hoping you can glean that the majority of the work is in replacing gatsby-transformer-remark with gatsby-mdx…

2019 January 27th

Over the past couple of weeks now I have set up several development machines at work and have had to also use two git accounts, GitHib and Bitbucket. To connect to both I use SSH as a preference, I have been using SSH in place of HTTPS for quite some…

2018 December 24th

From scratch to Create React App on Windows An opinionated guide on setting up a web development environment on Windows 10 I have been a professional web developer for 10 months now and used both MacOs and Windows in that time. My preferred OS to use…

2018 November 30th

Cliffs/TL;DR I made a recruiter FAQ on my personal site for recruiters and created an online CV . Preamble Apologies up front about this post if it comes across as entitled or ranty and I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with my approach. I'm…

2018 November 29th

Let's go through getting styled-components working with the Gatsby default starter. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5sWySCr668 In this example we're going to use the Gatsby default starter you get with CodeSandbox and add in styled…

2018 November 25th

Let's set up Gatsby to pull data from GraphCMS. video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9JeASI5tck This will be a walk-through of setting up some basic data on the headless CMS, GraphCMS and then querying that data in Gatsby. 1. Set up GraphCMS Set…

2018 September 8th

Let's use the React Context API to change theme in an app! But first, some context ! 🤣 Ok terrible puns aside let's have a look at what the React Context API is for and what it does. There's a great one liner from the React docs ... Context…

2018 May 28th

I thought I'd set up this blog with some sort of build pipeline, the intention was to have a good Continuous Integration pipeline so that if there were any issues when building the site that I wouldn't push a broken build. No one wants to see that…

2018 May 22nd

I'm a bit late to the party using the new React Context API , I did get to use it the other day at work, I also made a snippet to scaffold out a component for it. I had followed a couple of guides explaining how to use it and neither of them as…

2018 April 3rd

We're going to style the basic create react app with styled-components to look something like this: But first, preamble✨: I have always struggled with styling sites, it seems to be an aspect of starting web development that is either an afterthought…

2018 February 27th

Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. — Ferris Bueller. I'm going to go over steps I have taken the help me with learning to code ( again ) But fist, preamble: Let’s pick up a new skill, get a…

2018 January 13th

I'm a Windows user, I have been a Linux user as well but I have found that Windows is a bit less neckbeardy for me, both have their pros and cons. One of the big cons with Windows for me was when I started learning web development. That was until…

2017 June 30th

How to combine two separate unrelated Git repositories into one with single history timeline. Just adding a quick note on this… I had a project that started off as it’s own project but it ended up needing to go into an already existing project, so I…

2017 June 1st

Speed up your git workflow with git aliases, this is a brief introduction on using aliases 👌🚀👍 The more you work with Git the more familiar you become with the commands used in your every day workflow for your projects or your team's projects…

2017 May 31st

No doubt you have heard of Git or GitHub for source control, but what is source control? “Revision control (also known as version control, source control or (source) code management (SCM)) is the management of multiple revisions of the same unit of…

2017 May 23rd

How to build and deploy a multifunctional Twitter bot! This is a reference for me and anyone else that's interested in Twitter bots in JavaScript. All of the examples here use the npm package twit . We'll go through setting up a simple bot so each…

2017 March 15th

Just some rationalisation of what I'm currently doing. Recently I have decided that I'm going to improve my current skill set. To do this I'm studying with freeCodeCamp for a full stack developer certification, I'm also trying to learn as much as I…

2017 January 28th

Want to get set up with your very own Twitter bot quickly and easily, with this guide you can be set up in under 30 minutes. But first, why should you want to build a Twitter bot? There are some really useful Twitter bots out there that do some…

2017 January 5th

I know why Linus called it that now! If you're reading this there's a good chance you know at least the basics of Git but if like me and you are the only person making changes to your repos then there's a good chance that you just use git push…

2017 January 4th

I must say this was great to do and a nice little introduction to node and npm. I got to doing this from finding it on GitHub I think I was looking for the Twitter icon in bootstrap whilst working on my Random Quote Generator I stumbled across…

2016 December 17th

Since setting up this blog I haven't really bothered with Jekyll any more than just forking Barry Clarke's repo of Jekyll Now and adding these posts as and when the feeling takes me. So I got to checking out Barry's blog and his Jekyll Now templates…

2016 December 3rd

I'm a published developer! sort of Well that was a bit painful, well not actually I mean from the documentation I feel I was a bit mislead. So for those of you that know what I do for a living I'm primarily an Analyst Developer with a skill set of…

2016 November 14th

I have seen the same situation many times now in my career as a VBA Developer about how source code control is managed with VBA projects. Source control on VBA has long been a bit of a nonsense, there isn't any really. When I started my first…

2016 November 13th

Ok, I have recently discovered and started doing freeCodeCamp(🔥) which so far I'm really enjoying. Since being out of work I have had some time to start exploring different programming languages and technologies but I haven't found any courses that…