This is the website of Matt Hobbs, who is a Frontend Engineering Manager from Oxfordshire, UK.
Introduction In this post, I’ll tell the story of how a stray semicolon led me to build an AI-powered tool to make creating Content Security Policies (CSPs) a bit less painful for developers. I’ve written about CSPs on this blog before: December 2024 : Securing your static website with HTTP response headers February 2025 : Configuring your Content-Security-Policy on your development environment in…
Why I Built FractalAI Although AI has been a concept that has been discussed for the past 80 years (Thanks to Alan Turing, and many others ), it’s only in the past 5 to 10 years that it has become vastly more powerful. It is currently the hot topic in pretty much every industry on the planet! Software development in particular has already changed drastically, with new tools and AI Models popping…
Introduction I recently wrote a blog post that involved using a Cloudflare Worker to serve Brotli 11 compressed HTML rather than the standard uncompressed HTML file. Off the back of this post, I’ve decided to write one about my Cloudflare Worker setup that I use for my Contact Page . In order to stop the spam, I also integrated reCAPTCHA v3 into the form functionality. The form is pretty simple,…
Introduction In 2025, I wrote a series of web performance optimisation blog posts focussing on some of the key fundamental's of Frontend Web Performance: Caching Asset fingerprinting and the preload response header in 11ty Summary The blog post describes how the I enhanced web performance on my 11ty-built site by combining asset fingerprinting with the HTTP preload hint. It explains that preload…
This blog post will be building on a number of blog posts that I wrote earlier in the year. These were the posts: Using an 11ty Shortcode to craft a custom CSS pipeline Cranking Brotli up to 11 with Cloudflare Pro and 11ty The Speed Trifecta: 11ty, Brotli 11, and CSS Fingerprinting Some insights from my earlier posts may carry over here, so check them out for overlap or a fuller view of my custom…
Table of Contents Hack to the Future - Frontend 1. Introduction Context Looking back at "legacy" practices Lessons we can apply today 2. Setting the Time Circuits to the late 90s My first website build The late 90s web landscape 3. The Early Web - Layout and Design Practices Photoshop PSDs as the single source of truth Frame-Based Layouts Table-Based Layouts Quirks Mode Layouts Fixed Width Fonts…
This is just a short post to discuss how I improved my Content-Security-Policy (CSP), on my local development environment in 11ty. This is essentially a follow-on post from my Securing your static website with HTTP response headers I wrote last year. Note : this post isn’t exclusive to 11ty—it’s just the static site generator I use for this site. The code can be easily adapted for any static site…
Before writing this blog post I had 3 types of RSS feeds for my blog posts: Atom RSS JSON In this post, I'm going to add a 4th type: Plaintext. Origin A few months ago I was browsing my contacts and past colleagues looking for people to follow for my blogroll page . In doing so I just so happened to remember Terence Eden who I worked with at Government Digital Service (GDS). Terence (or edent , as…
So recently, I have written two 11ty related blog posts: Using an 11ty Shortcode to craft a custom CSS pipeline Cranking Brotli up to 11 with Cloudflare Pro and 11ty If you haven't read them, no problem, they are always there if you're ever struggling to sleep! TL;DR : In the first post I look at how I've automated CSS fingerprinting on production (Cloudflare), resulting in the ability to use…
I know I'm still a bit of a 11ty n00b, so I hope this isn't frowned upon in the community, but on rebuilding my blog using 11ty, I decided not to use the standard Bundle plugin that was added in v3.0.0 . Instead, I decided to write a custom Shortcode to customise my CSS output. In this blog post, I will go through the code I have written in the hope it will help others and more importantly gather…