Blog

When we were looking for a new venue for LeedsJS a few years ago, one of the criteria I set was "not a pub". Initially this seems like an arbitrary decision, but I had a number of reasons for doing so.

2018 has been an eventful year, with more personal firsts and a number of successful personal projects!

If you want to see last year's post, you can find it here.

Friday the 7th September 2012 was a bad day for me. That was the day that I was fired from my first development job. It was the beginning of a 7 month unemployment period where I struggled with depression, impostor syndrome and I asked myself some tough questions.

I've tried to start writing this post a few times. Mental health is a difficult topic to speak about in itself, and struggling with your own mental health can make it even more difficult.

While this post is difficult to write, I want to be open about it. I hope that this can help other people feel like they can talk about their mental health too.

The day before April's LeedsJS meetup, I decided to try not having Q&A after the talks in favour of encouraging people to come and chat to the speakers directly. There were a variety of reasons as to why I felt that this would be the best route, and it seems to have been a success!

At LeedsJS we've been lucky enough to have sponsors willing to offer up prizes for us to give away to our attendees. We've tried a couple of ways to give them away and I thought I'd write up a post to discuss them.

Modern browsers have the native selector engine document.querySelectorAll which is really useful for easily finding elements. I had assumed that it returned an Array but I've just found out that I was wrong and it returns a NodeList.

Chrome DevTools has a feature called blackboxing which allows you to ignore certain scripts when debugging. When a script is blackboxed, it's hidden from the call stack pane and you don't step into it when stepping through the code. This is really useful when debugging code that uses frameworks or libraries such as Ember, React or jQuery.

Today marks 4 years since I crashed and wrote off my car while driving to work one morning due to being burnt out. At the time I didn't really realise I was burnt out or even what burnout was.

While GitHub pages supports HTTPS for sites using the github.io domain, it doesn't support it for custom domains. I've had a few people ask how I've achieved HTTPS with a custom domain on GitHub pages, so I felt I should write a post on it.