A year ago, Nayana wrote a blog post outlining some changes to the way we support FT.com. As well as giving an excellent overview of what our “OpsCop” team did, it set out some changes that we intended to make. We wanted to stop being reactive and start proactively finding ways to enable operational excellence on FT.com. I’ve been working on the new team for about a year and I think the change in…
Recently I spent some time overhauling the build process for this website because it was really slow. After nearly 100 weeknotes (including a lot of images to resize) my build/deploy process was taking 6–7 minutes. Locally my entire site builds in 500–800ms so I decided to investigate where my performance issues were. The TL;DR here is that my builds have dropped to ~3 minutes, more than half my…
Some time ago, my friend and colleague chee told me about Webmentions . I’ll be honest, I didn’t fully understand what they were. It took me about a month to actually look into them, and wow it’s been a while since I’ve been this excited about a technology! I’m very late to the party, which started back in 2012 , but now I’ve arrived I’m ready to fully…
On the 12th March 2020, we got an email from Cait, our head of department, which explained that we’d be working remotely for the foreseeable future. At the time we had no idea how long it would last. The months dragged on, and in February 2021 we realised that the anniversary of remote working was rapidly approaching. Working remotely has been tough, and many of us really miss the social aspect of…
I first heard about and started using RSS in early 2008, it was a huge deal for me – I’d been going to individual tech sites to consume my news, and had collected a large set of bookmarks. As I browsed the web I’d been dutifully ignoring a little orange icon that would eventually revolutionise the way I read content on the internet. This post explains RSS for the uninitiated, it talks…
Way back in March this year, early on in lockdown, I had a burst of inspiration and a desire to build something silly. I don’t really build serious open-source things any more because tbh it’s a pretty thankless task and my free time is too valuable. However when there’s an opportunity to get a quick laugh from a friend by spending several solid evenings coding, sign me up! This…
I’m out of breath because I practically ran home to write this post. I’m excited because, as of today, Pa11y and all of the projects around it have moved to a new GitHub organisation . This is an important step for us, we’re moving towards being a self-governing team and away from any one company. We believe this will help us better achieve our goal – to help make the web more…
Your project’s README is pretty important; it’s often the first thing that a person new to your project will see, and is frequently the only source of documentation. Your README does the same job for your open source project as a website does for a company, and while websites get a lot of user-experience attention, our README files are rarely even considered from a user perspective.…
In an attempt to encourage myself to post more, I’ve given my website a design refresh! Whether this tactic works or not remains to be seen, but it prompted me to look through all of my old site designs. I thought it’d be fun to post them here. 2010 aka “Corners and Shadows” Diagonal Lines! Border Radius! Box Shadows! Bright Colours! I think this design really pops ,…
Over the last year, we have begun the process of migrating many Nature journals to our new platform. Because journals on the new platform also come with a significant redesign, we were required to run an opt-in beta program to trial the new design and gather feedback. The beta program had many requirements: Opted out users should see the old version of the site on the legacy platform Opted in…
pa11y is a command-line tool used to find accessibility issues in web pages. Nature built and released pa11y to address a short-fall in automatable accessibility testing; it uses HTML CodeSniffer in PhantomJS to raise common issues and reports them in both human and machine readable formats. This post assumes that you’ve installed pa11y ( requirements and instructions ). pa11y is most useful…
This is the first in a series of posts which will explain some of the concepts and terminology which are thrown about in JavaScript land, with a focus on beginners. In this post we’ll be looking at the term “Async”; what it means and why it matters to you as a JavaScript developer. Recently, I was reminded of my early days in development. Being a self-taught JavaScript noob, it…
Last weekend I built CSSDB , a curated collection of great CSS, Sass, LESS and Stylus libraries. It was primarily an excercise in learning, but it was also a site which I could have made excellent use of (especially in the early stages of my development career). I launched on Monday to little fanfare, but on Tuesday the site suddenly seemed to explode in popularity. This was quite unexpected, but…
It’s been about 9 months since my last site design/refresh, and the code was starting to show it’s age (that’s got to be a separate post – just how quickly standards change). I recently built a couple of small sites with Jekyll and decided to port by existing blog over to it. Jekyll is a beautifully simple static site generator. The ease-of-use with this tool is crazy, I had so…
Over the last couple of evenings, I’ve been playing with the Node.js Cluster module and using it to dramatically improve the amount of load Express apps can handle. The results have been amazing. The Cluster module is fairly easy to pick up if you’re used to working with Node.js, but I thought I’d blog about my experience – hopefully it will help you either understand or see the…
I was talking to a friend recently about getting back into game development; he was very enthusiastic about learning to develop JavaScript games and we were discussing where to start. I had one of those moments when you impart some advice to somebody, and afterwards realise that it’s great advice you’ve been ignoring yourself. The advice in this case was: “Don’t be too…
I’m going to talk about something which irritates me; you’ll have to forgive me if I descend into a rant at first, but trust me – there’s a point to this! The dressing up of technology in advertising doesn’t work for me. I like to know how the product looks, feels and works in as short a time as possible. The same principals apply to web design. Sell It To Me Think about…
A couple of months ago, I decided to set about building a CSS grid system. I realise that I’ve entered a wildly bloated landscape here (you can’t move on the web for fancy new grid systems) but I had my reasons. I’d like to talk about why I built a grid system, and why (maybe) you should too. My Problem When my website went through its last rebuild, I realised that there was no…
I’d like to begin this post with a disclaimer: I’m not an accessibility expert. In fact, web accessibility scares me; it’s that daunting consideration when kicking off a web project that can send shivers down the spines of the hardiest developers. Luckily, us web folk love a challenge! The purpose of this post is to talk about the common misunderstanding that accessibility means…