Blog

Why you should never stop asking for help at work

There’s a pattern I’ve observed through my time as an engineer and a manager. As someone progresses through their career, the amount they ask for help from others follows a u-curve, and takes a significant dip around the mid-level portion of their career. If left unchecked, that lack of support and collaboration can slow down their growth, cause a lot of unnecessary stress, and lower the quality of their work. This is something which then needs to be unlearned as the person continues to grow on to a more senior level.

How I use journaling to support my wellbeing

I see a lot of mentions of journaling on social media. Some of the personal development books I’ve read include journaling prompts at the end of each chapter. Any search of the term will turn up a lot of content on the benefits of journaling. But what I don’t really see anyone talking about, is what journaling means to them, or how they go about it.

Why I don't work Wednesdays anymore

As I write this article, I’m 31 years old. I’m not married. I don’t have kids, or anyone who’s dependent on me in any way. I’m not studying for a new qualification, or any of the other classic reasons to work part-time. For me that’s precisely why it’s the perfect time to start this new chapter in my life.

Why it's so hard to reach out

When I shared my story about my journey with mental health, I expected to get a range of reactions. The reception I received was overwhelmingly positive, but there was one kind of reaction from a few people that I really hadn’t anticipated: they were surprised that I hadn’t said something sooner.

Don't assume what's in your node_modules folder

NPM v3 has been out for a little while now, and with it has come a not insignificant change, the structure of the node_modules folder has been largely flattened. If you're just using other modules within your project, then this change shouldn't really impact you. If you're publishing an npm module with dependency on other modules, however, then this change means that the dependencies of your module are likely to be in the root level.

Cleaning up your Gruntfile with hidden subtasks

A Gruntfile can become less-manageable quite easily when there are multiple things wanting to run the same set of tasks. For example, the steps to compile CSS might always be to run sass and then autoprefixer, but this would be both part of the main build task, required as part of any dist task there may be, and then run on watch any time a .scss source file changes.

Notes from #lwssausage

My notes from London Web Standards June Event #lwssausage - Bruce's tour of the sausage factory by Bruce Lawson, and Building awesome responsive experiences with JavaScript by Jonathan Fielding.

Notes from Front-end London April

My notes from Front-end London's April Event - The world keeps spinning round and round from Arran Ross-Paterson, Bridging the gap between developers and designers with Sass from Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, and Over promised and under delivered from Peter Gasston.

Notes from #lwshttp

My notes from London Web Standards March Event #lwshttp - Playlister: Developing a new music product at the BBC by Sara Gonzalo, and What to expect from HTTP/2 from Mark Nottingham.

Notes from #lwslightning

My notes from London Web Standards November Event #lwslightning - Architecting for Success from Daniel Knell, and four lightning-talks by Laura Dawson, Leonard Houx, Fabio Bertone, and Daniel Appelquist.

Notes from #lwsw3trends

My notes from the two talks at London Web Standards November - Firefox OS in a nutshell, by Fernando Campo and Borja Salguero; What's new in Web Standards by Daniel Appelquist.

Converting from LESS to Sass

Initially I fell down on the LESS side of this divide, the main reason being the ease of it. All you have to do is include the javascript file and you're away. Syntactically it's a whole lot easier to use as well, there's almost no extra syntax to learn, and writing custom mixins takes no time at all.