In JS, it’s easy to get caught out when determining if a variable is null, undefined, or has a value of zero. I do a lot of data visualisation, and quite often I’ll need to filter out null values from an array of data.
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I don’t see people using the gap property for flexbox out in the wild all that often, but it’s pretty cool!
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It’s been a year since Twitter (X) went down the pan, and I finally got around to removing the Twitter link from this site. I haven’t visited the platform in months, except periodically, guiltily checking that I haven’t missed an important DM. I never post there, and the occasional fleeting glimpse of my feed is enough to convince me I’m not missing much.
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In case you missed it, Matthias Ott has a new newsletter. Own Your Web is a lovely, fortnightly newsletter about “about designing, building, creating, and publishing for and on the Web”, which captures a whole bunch of people in its remit: designers, developers, writers, content creators and more. I was pleasantly surprised to get a shoutout in the latest issue for my recent article for MDN on web sustainability!
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In my spare time I do a bit of voluntary development work for an activist network. What I like about this kind of work (aside from helping a good cause) is that I get to experience an entirely different codebase, architecture and working process than I do in my paid employment.
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I’m not a person who creates CSS “art” (as in drawings), but I do like messing about with CSS gradients and seeing what comes up. I think the first time I became aware that you could create some pretty cool effects with CSS gradients was Lea Verou’s CSS3 Patterns Gallery.
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Recently I wrote about the COP28 climate summit’s website, which featured a low-carbon toggle that did precisely nothing. The post captured the interest of a few people, and I was contacted by ABC News Australia, who published a story on it, inviting me and web sustainability consultant Fershad Irani to comment.
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Today I learned from Amy Hupe that November is National Blog Posting Month, or #NaBloPoMo, if you will. I’ve always liked the idea of posting one thing a day (blog post, tip, sketch, photo, whatever), even while secretly thinking that people who commit to that must have a few screws loose. There’s a sense of achievement that comes from forcing myself to generate some sort of creative output regularly though.
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This past year I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, trying to square my own work as a web developer with my personal values and the impact I want to have on the world.
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It’s important to reflect on the environmental impact of our work and do what we can to reduce it. Don’t know where to start? This article for MDN introduces some ways in which developers can improve the efficiency of the website we build and take steps to make our work more sustainable.
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You might notice on some websites you visit that external links display a little icon next to them. This is super helpful for users, as it lets them know that the link is going to take them somewhere off-site.
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Update (28th October 2023): Since this post was published the COP28 website has undergone some changes. Many of the images are now better optimised, and the low-carbon toggle actually prevents them from loading. Much more could be done to optimise the site, however, and many of the points still stand.
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