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Blog - Articles by Michael

  • Posted by Michael 4 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    It seems like simple daily web games, à la Wordle or Framed, have been quite popular over the pandemic. One could argue that interest began to wane as everything opened up again, but I still know many people who consistently log in to challenge themselves each day. My partner especially, loves these games - playing about 3 different ones without fail. I had an idea whilst this craze was going on for a similar daily game but one, unlike Wordle or Framed, which required you to log on the next day to see if you had guessed correctly. I decided I'd build it to see if I can get it added to my partner's daily schedule.

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  • Posted by Michael 5 min read 18 likes 13 comments

    A while back I introduced likes to the blog through the use of Webmentions and Bridgy. I even went so far as to release my own library for handing Webmentions which I'm pleased to say I've been steadily working on ever since. On the other hand, this blog has been using Utterances to handle comments practically since I started it. Despite how happy I've been with Utterances, I've also been very aware of it's limitations as a comment platform. Not everyone has a GitHub account, and while this blog is primarily targeted at technical individuals, I want to decrease barriers to interaction for those who are possibly newer to the development scene.

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  • Posted by Michael 7 min read 2 likes 7 comments

    For a long time now, I've been frustrated by how slow the official twitter embed is. Any page where I've embedded a tweet, becomes noticeably slower. The warnings on lighthouse are always the same - "Reduce the impact of third-party code". When broken down further, you can see that you spend on average 730ms exclusively on twitter javascript files. This is frankly unusable. However, there is a solution, albeit one that requires some effort.

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  • Posted by Michael 4 min read 3 likes 0 comments

    Often times when I speak to developers who have just started writing typescript, they have begun to understand static typing. They understand that they can label a variable as type string and then rely on the fact that it will be a string within a function. There is however, another, rather large part of typescript that I don't see newer typescript devs use very often. Type Guards and their ability to branch code in the event a function takes multiple types are extreemly useful. So today, I'm going to explain Type Guards and why you should be using them.

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  • Posted by Michael 3 min read 7 likes 0 comments

    Javascript has had arrow functions (() => true) for a while now. Introduced as part of ES6 (The 2015 edition of the ECMAScript spec), They allow developers to create easy anonymous functions that use their parent's scoped this value. I'd argue that it is one of the most important changes ever made to Javascript in the realm of code readability (followed closely by promises for helping to solve Callback Hell), However, there is currently a stage 2 proposal specification that I believe has the potential to be just as, if not, more impactful in the world of readable code.

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  • Posted by Michael 8 min read 7 likes 0 comments

    One of my favourite features of hosted blogging platforms, such as Medium, is the simple feedback systems they have in place. Medium posts display a number of claps and comments. Each user can give a post up-to 20 claps based on how much they like a post. This means that, at a glance, you have information that can tell you how valuable the content of a post is considered. Sites like Reddit and Hacker News use an upvote/downvote system for a similar purpose and most social media sites have some form of "likes". Unfortunately, like many other software development bloggers, I self host my blog.,,

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  • Posted by Michael 2 min read 4 likes 15 comments

    We've all been there. Cooking a complex recipe where each step takes a good couple of minutes. Our hands covered in some type of sauce made of who knows how many ingredients. We go to check the next step on our phone only to see that it's gone to sleep due to inactivity. We know that even if we quickly wash our hands, there is inevitably going to be some level of greasy trail left on our phone screen as we are forced to unlock it...

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  • Posted by Michael 4 min read 0 likes 0 comments

    Don't you just love the native share UI on Android and IOS? Well, did you know that you can provide that exact experience to users of your website using the navigator.share web API? You can do so in just a couple of minutes and a few lines of JavaScript!

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  • Posted by Michael 4 min read 1 like 1 comment

    RSS (RDF Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) is an XML based web feed standard that is commonly used by blog and news sites to supply their most recent posts to third parties. It was initially released on March 15, 1999, a little over 23 years ago at time of writing. Since then, it has had a few revisions & alternatives notabley RSS 2.0 (September 7, 2002) and Atom (December 2005). Most sites that still use RSS, will use Atom.

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  • Posted by Michael 9 min read 1 like 1 comment

    If you follow me on social media, you're probably aware of the social image that shows up for any articles I share from this site. It's a giant image of my face. Now I don't know about you but I don't think this is a great image for getting engagment. I wouldn't click it...

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