After years of hosting this blog on Netlify, I’ve
decided to finally move it to my Dokku server hosted with
Linode. Don’t get me wrong Netlify is great, but
I realised I wanted a bit more control over my own hosting and Dokku gives me
that. I’d like to spin up a Gemini site at
some point in the future and hosting on my own server should make that much
easier.
After playing around with various buildpacks to build the site on Dokku I ended
up settling on a custom Dockerfile config that works great and means I can
deploy in less than two minutes.
COVID-19 is raging out of control (especially in the US, but don’t think you’re
better off in Britain; they are third on the list), but you wouldn’t know it by
listening to the government. New York City is in “phase 3” of re-opening, which
included limited re-opening of restaurants (although this has since been
reversed). The reality is that COVID-19 does not give a shit about government
guidelines and is continuing to spread regardless.
All this to say, you do not want to get this virus. So I’m urging you all to
take the necessary precautions. Wash your hands on a regular basis, for at least
20 seconds. Wear a mask when you need to run an errand (such as shopping for
groceries). If you must socialise, meet people outside (the risks are much
lower) and practice social distancing. And for the love of $deitystay out of
the pubs!
I’ve been interested in computer graphics for as long as I can remember. The
reason I started programming at all was because I wanted to make things happen
on the screen.
Recently I’ve been playing around with fragment shaders. Fragment shaders are
tiny programs that run on the GPU and compute the colour of individual pixels
(fragments). They do this incredibly quickly because the GPU has a large number
of simple processing cores, often numbering in the hundreds or thousands, to
enable massive parallelisation.
The murder of George Floyd has sparked outrage across America and the rest of
the world, and rightly so. The death of so many members of the black community
at the hands of the US police is horrifying and utterly heartbreaking.
That this has happened against the backdrop of a global pandemic just makes
things worse.
Neil Peart, the drummer and lyricist of progressive rock band
Rush, has died, CBC News and Rolling Stone report.
According to the reports, Peart died on January 7 in Santa Monica,
California after a years-long battle with brain cancer. He was 67
years old.
Renowned for his technical expertise and unique performance style,
Neil Peart was considered by many to be one of the best rock drummers
of all time. He retired from professional drumming, and Rush, in
2015. Find a statement from bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson
below.
This makes me very sad. Neil Peart was legendary. Such an incredible
musician.
For a good number of years I was using Basecamp’s Pow for local web development
and one of my favourite features was the in built local DNS resolver that meant
that *.dev would resolve to 127.0.0.1. This mean that I had a unique
hostname for every site I was building and running locally which I have found
incredibly useful.
Unfortunately Pow no longer sees active development (the GitHub repo has been
archived) so I wanted to see if I could set up the same kind of local resolver
on my Mac without using it.
In elevating frontend to the land of Serious Code we have not just made things
incredibly over-engineered but we have also set fire to all the ladders that we
used to get up here in the first place.
The <a> tag is one of the most important building blocks of the
Internet. It lets you create a hyperlink: a piece of text, usually colored
blue, that you can use to go to a new page. When you click on a hyperlink,
your web browser downloads the new page from the server and displays it on the
screen. Most web browsers also store the pages you previously visited so you
can quickly go back to them. The best part is, the <a> tag gives you all
of that behavior for free! Just tell the browser where you want to go, and it
handles the rest.
Lately, though, that hasn’t been enough for website developers. The new fad is
“client-side navigation”, where instead of relying on the browser to load new
pages for you, you write a bunch of JavaScript code to do it instead. It’s
actually really hard to get it right—loading the new page is simple enough,
but you also have to write code to display a loading bar, make the Back and
Forward buttons work, show an error page if the connection drops, and so on.
So much this! The trend towards building a website/web app as a Javascript front
end talking to an API makes web development more complicated than it needs to
be. Many of these sites could (and should) be server rendered HTML.
