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# Docs / Notes / my Techy Online Scrap Book

Welcome to my digital brain. The vast majority of my learnings get noted in a web of markdown docs. Thanks to the creators of this static site framework, that web of markdown documents are now searchable! The few finished pieces (articles) that emerge are listed below.

  • March 2021 Learn Pact JS
  • March 2021 Sell some NFTs (opens new window) Or at least, put some up for sale. If you look at what I'm selling there I wouldn't blame you for buying the whole lot because it's AMAZING.
  • Feb 2018 30 Days of MDN (opens new window), every day have a peruse through the MDN list of Web APIs, pick one, have a read about it, give it a shot! The link there is to the github repo containing the notes / super-mini demos of each days thing.
  • 2018 ish map out google location history (opens new window)... wow that's a bit scary - really obvious where we've lived!
  • Feb 2018 Make a super simple Static site generator (opens new window) just using js template strings.
  • April 2016 Console Madness (opens new window): makes it look like you are doing something phenomenal but you're just typing randomly. Wrote this because a film crew came round the place I was working at and asked me to do something on the computer that looked cody and impressive.
  • 2012 - 2018 WordPress. For me this was the beginning of my development (after the preamble that was the Stanford Java course (opens new window)). As a freelance Graphic Designer I didn't really know what I was doing code wise, but I'd still build you a website! I doubt I'll ever go back to good old WP - if you're looking to set up a site now, I'd just say go sign up for SquareSpace or which ever platform is the easiest, simplest, DIY website builder that'll do everything for you. Life's not long enough to build your own. Thanks WordPress! And goodbye.

# In progress / abandoned things

# Expired Articles

Expired?!? These were posted on one of my old employers websites, that employer was bought and the blog shut down. Fortunately I still have a copy of these but in my email, so I need to work through them and tidy them all up. TODO!

  • SVG 101: Anatomy (opens new window) In a previous life I knew SVG through illustration. Now, as a developer, I wanted to know the details - to dive into the guts of the thing. This is a fairly through post on the basic element types that make up an SVG.
  • SVG 101: Setting up (opens new window) Optimizing, embedding, and a dive into SVG's viewport / viewbox. Note that the date on the site is just a reflection of when this was published, it sat in the company 'todo' folder for a couple of years. Even made it through an acquisition and onto the new company's blog! Fancy that!
  • .htaccess: a FED guide to redirects (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) This dive into apache came about to try and help alleviate a bottleneck in our pipeline at work. Server configuration is not exactly the most popular subject in the office.
  • Redux: attempting a simple overview (opens new window) This was part of my pitch to use some kind of state management for a complex product listing front end. The idea was turned down which at least gave me the experience of building complex state without a tool like Redux, I would be curious to know how much time we could have saved had we used it!
  • Regular expressions in Javascript, why so painful!?! (opens new window) Sometime I'll just pick a subject and dive in. I don't use regular expressions very often, but for the times I do it's nice to know what's going on!
  • CSS Layouts (part 1): The Past - Everything else (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) Floats, tables, and also display table. It's interesting to see the influence I felt from the community against display table, I've done a 180 since then, display table is magic.
  • CSS Layouts (part 2): The Present - Flexbox (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) A dig into flexbox in my own words. I'm pretty sure writing this article was the 'click' point for my understanding of flexbox, hard to imagine life without it now!
  • CSS Layouts (part 3): The Future - Grids (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) CSS Grids and also the viewport units. These only started sneaking into our work towards the end of 2017, and even then it's still experimental.
  • Service Workers (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) A technical introduction to service workers. Although on the public company blog I really wrote it with the rest of the team in mind in the hope that service workers would start to play a bigger part in our projects.
  • Google Analytics for Front End Developers (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) We are frequently asked to paste in that snippet of ga js, and occasionally other bits to go with it. I wanted to dig deeper into how it all worked. The title says 'for feds' but it's just another way of saying 'a bit technical'.
  • Sass (part 1): Architecture (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) At work all our sass was organized the same way. This was my exploration of other strategies. Note the age of this article, things have evolved since then.
  • Sass (part 2): tips and Tricks (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) Essentially a miscellaneous bucket for small sass tips, from those we use at work to those that were found while writing the previous article.
  • CSS in 3D (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) A fun jaunt into the 3d world. Probably written in the hope that it might inspire some of our projects to take advantage of the more interesting capabilities of css.
  • Chrome Dev tools (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) I read through the docs, noted the important parts, condensed it, and put it down in writing. Note that the chrome dev tools team have been quite prolific - they have added a lot more since I wrote this!
  • Git Commands cheat sheet (to be retrieved, original site&company was bought out) A quick run through of git for those who already have a little experience (while writing this I only had a little experience with git, this was my way of digging into it. This was also during the time that Delphic started switching over from SVN

# Handy things

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