This Christmas I managed to pick up the worst cold I’ve had in years. Instead of heading out and crushing the Festive 500km challenge I decided to stay home and brush up on some tech while performing some website housekeeping for willmorgan.co.uk.

In the 2 years I’ve had the site online, I’ve picked up some better practices and learned a few tricks. I had a few specific goals in mind:

• Enable HTTPS
  Google will start penalising websites that don’t support HTTPS in 2017.
• Ensure the website can be developed and deployed from anywhere
  I started developing on my desktop, but when doing some updates using a new machine, it was painful getting a development environment set up. …

In 2016, the year of JavaScript fatigue, there’s still a lot to be learned by trying out some of the technology being peddled on Hacker News.

Redux is a simplistic Flux architecture that encourages you to carefully think about how you structure the domains within your application, forces the concept of immutable data within your application’s state, and also strongly encourages you to understand function purity.

As a beginner, I found the EggHead videos an incredible resource. The documentation and wider community discussion is overwhelming at first because you’ve got very smart guys talking about purity, arity, ramda, bacon, and reducing. …

I’ve been cycling to work now for about 10 months, although I started writing this post after 2 months. The experience, by and large, has been overwhelmingly pleasant. I have a great route, the weather has been unusually kind, and I’ve got fitter by a ridiculous magnitude without really trying.

I would honestly prefer cycling over public transport any day of the week as long as I had the correct gear (more on that later.)

Let’s start with the bad stuff, as that’s where most conversations start when colleagues see me carry my bike up the stairs and lean it up against the wall in my office. …

HLZ — Gaia

I had a great Friday evening this week, and it made me truly realise how lucky I am to be part of such a beautiful scene, as strange as it seems to outsiders look upon it.

I’ve recently made the choice to give alcohol a rest, at least for a little while. This made the night all the more interesting, and left me with the clarity of mind to digest it all.

I’ve been listening to drum and bass for around 10 years now, and while I don’t think there’s much evidence to say the genre attracts a certain kind of person as a listener, it does seem quite niche. …

This is a short chronicle of an incredibly interesting period I enjoyed in August this year, spent debugging and scaling a fast-growing NodeJS application that had just been rolled out to a larger userbase. It tested my knowledge on Node’s processing model, how to work under a bombardment of automated ping failure messages, and ended up teaching me and my team a few great lessons. …

Just enjoyed tweaking bike cables and gearsets for half an hour. Takes me back to the joys of playing with Lego as a kid and made me realise that the default mindset of a lot of people these days is to always replace, never repair, and never get your hands dirty. The popular perception is that there’s always a lack of time and plenty of money, but the value you get out of fixing even basic equipment that you don’t know much about is definitely worth the time.

There’s a massive sense of fulfilment to be had after playing about with something, the thrill at some points you wonder if you’ve made the problem worse and you to need to take it to an expert, and then at last finally ending up with a fixed piece of equipment after pulling, pushing and prodding stuff with a screwdriver and set of pliers. …

A few years ago via Hacker News (where else?), I heard about Soylent, the powdered food eerily named after the film. Futuristic dystopia fears aside, the idea of a powdered formula that gives me 100% of everything I’m supposed to put down my gullet that is ready to eat within minutes is quite an appealing one, for the following reasons:

• I can worry less about ensuring I eat a balanced diet
• I no longer spend 30% of my free time at home cooking
• my domestic food waste will be mostly eliminated
• my food spend will be dramatically reduced

Soylent isn’t yet available for sale in the UK, so I checked out Joylent, the European (and apparently tastier) cousin. …

I’ve been meaning to use Gulp for a while now — I’ve normally used Grunt for builds.

I decided to use Gulp to take care of builds for my single page personal website. So far I’ve been pleased with how much easier and expressive it is to set up builds, instead of getting bogged down with endless configuration hashes. It also has watch functionality out of the box, and appears to run faster, too.

After getting the usual CSS minification, JS uglification, asset concatenation, and autoprefixification out of the way, I needed to sort out some more resilient cache busting, because using query strings in URLs doesn’t always work. …