The personal website of Mike Babb, a software engineer turned engineering manager in Bristol, UK.
A few years ago I came across this bookmarklet that removes sticky elements from a webpage. If you’re bothered by sticky headers/footers/sidebars taking up screen space and following you down the page, you click the bookmarklet to remove them and restore some calm 🧘♂️ If that sounds appealing, drag the link below to your bookmarks bar: No Sticky Here’s the JavaScript it runs when you click it:…
Linux and macOS are often described as being similar enough that migrating from one to the other is pretty straightforward. That’s been mostly true for me, and I’ve been scribbling notes to myself as a newcomer that might be helpful for anyone doing the same. Window Management I was surprised to find window management is pretty basic on macOS. On Linux (and even Windows 11), you can tile open…
Old tech is great tech. In this post I enthuse about ditching social media and going back to using RSS for content discovery like in the (g)olden days of the internet 🧓 Reddit and Doomscrolling The Reddit API debacle has been a bit of a blessing for me. Gone now is a decade-long habit of reaching for my phone in idle moments, opening the Relay for Reddit app, and scrolling through lots of…
I was recently issued a new work laptop running Windows 11, and while I was a little hesitant after more than a decade of Linux for both work and personal use, I’ve been impressed with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) : The Windows Subsystem for Linux lets developers run a GNU/Linux environment – including most command-line tools, utilities, and applications – directly on Windows, unmodified,…
One of my favourite PlayStation 5 features is the ability to stream games to other devices, so I can squeeze in some gaming without taking over the TV. There are official Remote Play clients for Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac, but Linux isn’t supported. Instead, I’ve been using an open source client called Chiaki that works well with a little configuration. Here’s what I did to get it set up and…
A few months ago I read the excellent 20th anniversary edition of The Pragmatic Programmer by David Thomas and Andrew Hunt, and one of the tips I put in to practice right away was to start keeping an engineering daybook. My Daybook My daybook is a physical notebook that lives on my desk, and as I work I jot down any little details that seem relevant to my current task - things I need to do, notes…
About a year ago I was promoted from Developer to Tech Lead, and now feels like a good time to take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned so far. Here are the 3 main things I’ve taken away from my first year in the role: 1. Team productivity > your productivity One of my biggest shifts in mindset has been the way I think about productivity. In my early days in the role I struggled a bit with…
Many operating systems offer some form of “dark mode” that allows the user to set their preference for a darker UI, and some can even switch between light and dark themes depending on the time of day. In this post I’ll show you how to use CSS variables to provide light and dark themes for your websites and apps that are applied automatically depending on the user’s preference. Setting colours with…
Ubuntu 20.04 was released on 23 April, and it looks really good . I decided to upgrade my home laptop, and this post is a little summary of how I’ve gotten on with the new OS. Patience (or Lack Thereof) I don’t spend as much time tinkering with Linux as I used to, so I stick to Ubuntu’s Long Term Support (LTS) releases for maximum stability with the least amount of hassle. I can wait for the bugs…
Following a role change at work I have rather a lot more stuff to keep track of now, and my new responsibilities quickly outgrew my previous note-taking setup of plain markdown files in a notes folder. I began looking for a free, open source software solution that could better fit my needs and within a few days of trying it out, Joplin became indispensable to me. I like that I can write notes in…
Recently I’ve been trying to reduce my dependence on proprietary apps and services. At first I just wanted a self-hosted alternative to Dropbox, but I quickly found I could build an entire private cloud using Nextcloud , and replace a lot of the services I used to rely on Google for. Nextcloud is free, open source software that you install on your own server, and the process isn’t much more…
I recently decided to migrate my website from WordPress to a set of completely static pages, and settled on Jekyll for managing my site content. The whole process took a good few hours, but some of that time was spent on a little diversion where I took the opportunity to move from a front end workflow based on Grunt to Gulp . What’s wrong with WordPress? Nothing! WordPress is great, actually. It’s…
This post was originally written for Green Chameleon . The term "progressive web app" (PWA) doesn't necessarily describe an app at all - it's really a label that can be applied to any website that implements a particular set of technologies. Making your site a PWA has a lot of benefits, and can even be a better choice than building a dedicated mobile app for Android or iOS. Why build a progressive…
I've been actively reducing the time I spend on Twitter lately after noticing that more often than not it leaves me feeling sad, frustrated, or even angry. I joined years ago to keep up with tech news, network with other web developers, and share articles and tips. Twitter has undergone a lot of changes in the time I've been using it, and I've found a tech-centric Mastodon instance that's a much…
If you walk in to a high street store and tell them you're looking for a laptop that's fast, built to last, and your budget is around the £200 mark, you'll probably give the salespeople a good chuckle. Conventional wisdom is that when buying laptops, you either spend big on a Macbook or a similarly top of the line ultrabook, or you spend somewhere around £500 - £600 on something that feels a bit…
I've previously written about using <picture> and WebP to dramatically reduce the weight of your pages , but if all your assets are PNG or JPG you might need a way to generate WebP images from them. There's probably a plugin for your image editor of choice that can export your images as WebP, but this kind of repetitive manual job is exactly what task runners like Grunt and Gulp are really good…
This post was originally written for Green Chameleon . It used to be that strong security was only considered a necessity for e-commerce sites, or sites handling sensitive personal information - but that perception is rapidly changing. Securing a site with an HTTPS connection was once seen as an unnecessary expense unless there was a specific business reason for doing it, or a legal requirement -…
At a recent Bristol Web Performance meetup Bruce Lawson gave a talk on responsive image techniques using the <picture> element he devised and had added to the HTML spec with help from some other clever people . I happened to be starting work on a project that's particularly image-heavy for a client, so it seemed like a great opportunity to try out Bruce's techniques and see what kind of bandwidth…