Debug all HTTP(S) sent by git, npm, apt-get, or anything else The command line is powerful, but can be hard to understand, and extremely hard to debug. Ever run a command, see it fail with a cryptic error, and have no idea why? Better tools can help you understand what’s…

HTTP View is a beautiful, free & open-source HTTP inspector. This is the first release of HTTP Toolkit, and lets you intercept HTTP or HTTPS traffic with one click, explore & examine that traffic up close, and discover exactly what your code (or anybody else’s) is sending. Want to dive…

Federate your content just one more step, all by yourself, and making jumping ship a little less scary. — [Edit: once upon a time the below was the only way to do this, and there weren’t many other options. That’s no longer true though! Nowadays, I’d recommend looking at proper tools like https://moa.party/ instead, which handle this much more effectively.] Mastodon has been quietly building popularity for a good…

Because sometimes you want to know if they actually work. — Bash scripts are unloved and underappreciated. Many of us developers spend a lot of time on the command line, and a good shell script is an incredibly powerful thing to drop into & extend your existing workflow. Shell scripting isn’t easy though. Many of the tools and techniques you might…

CSS-only tabs are a fun topic, and :target is a delightfully elegant declarative approach, except for the bit where it doesn’t work. …

Part 2: How to use client-side libraries like Leaflet, in Node. — As discussed in Part One: Why?, it’d be really useful to be able to take an interesting UI component like a map, and pre-render it on the server as a web component, using Server Components. We don’t want to do the hard mapping ourselves though. Really, we’d like this to…

Get easy confidence on exactly what you’re committing. — Git Confirm is a git hook, which asks you to confirm when you commit a change that includes additions from a (configurable) list of risky matches. Think ‘TODO’, ‘FIXME’, ‘@Ignore’, ‘describe.skip/it.skip’ and ‘describe.only/it.only’. You can drop Git Confirm in, and effortlessly stop yourself ever committing anything like this by accident. …

You’ve written an application deployed using Dokku, and you’ve got it all up and running and great. You’ve heard a lot about why HTTPS is important nowadays, especially the SEO and performance benefits, and you’d like to add all that, with minimal cost and hassle. Let’s get right on that. …

Part 1: Why do we need better maps? — Maps are a standard tool in our web UI toolkit; they’re an easy way to link our applications to the real world they (hopefully) involve. …