21st July, 2024
Time to read: 25 mins.
An email came in from Yelp yesterday reminding me of a project I had long since forgotten about. The project was called Random Food Picker which I started over 5 years ago now. It does what it sounds like… picks (randomly) a food location so you don’t have to.
2nd June, 2024
Time to read: 5 mins.
I recently hit 2 years working at Public Trust, and perhaps it is just a side effect of my ageing but the time has absolutely flown by. Although I don’t want to get into the specifics of my work, I thought the two year mark would be a great time to reflect on the differences that working at a large organisation such as Public Trust brings compared to my previous work experience, and what learnings I have taken so far.
28th November, 2021
Time to read: 10 mins.
When I saw that PHP 8.1 had been released, I thought back to the jump in performance that 8.0 brought, and how far PHP has come from 5.6. Would the 8.1 increase be as dramatic as each minor version of 7 was? I searched online but found very few results benchmarking PHP 8.1 in any meaningful kind of way. Either they had tested 8.1 when it was in alpha stage, some 5+ months ago, or they just made generic statements such as “5-8% faster”.
19th May, 2021
Time to read: 15 mins.
HTTP Security Headers are often the last thing a developer wants to think about when creating a new site but are critical to your website’s security. HTTP Security Header Misconfiguration is featured in the current OWASP Top 10 2017 and even before that in the OWASP Top 10 2013 when it was spread through multiple issues. If you are unfamiliar with OSWAP, I recommend reading about them.
4th May, 2021
Time to read: 8 mins.
I have stepped away from the 9-5 to work on the family business, but I figure now is a good time to look back and re-examine my learnings from the past 2 years working at a digital agency. I believe the process of working in a relatively small company that is not fixated solely on web development proposes unique challenges and I hope you can take away something new from my experience.
26th February, 2021
Time to read: 4 mins.
After almost 4 months, my Hackoberfest T-Shirt finally made its way to New Zealand! To celebrate, I explain a problem new developers come across when exploring open source technologies, and why it matters.
The journey of any passionate, new developer begins, or quickly finds its way to, Github. Whether for sharing or recycling code, Github holds a monopoly on open source development which makes it almost impossible to avoid. Although I am, and always have been a huge fan of Github, I find these new developers are getting mislead in the sea of stars and forks on what real-world technology looks like.
13th December, 2020
Time to read: 4 mins.
I break my almost 10 month absence from this blog to bring you my recent learnings and development. Over the past few months I have participated in Hacktoberfest, started and competed in road cycling, and learned much more about Ruby on Rails, but today I wanted to write about two different significant events recently. Working alone and migrating to Linux.
29th February, 2020
Time to read: 3 mins.
It has been quite some time since I’ve written about my progress. As per the last post I wrote five months ago, Lifestyle vs Career, I have fully embraced the four day work week Ninetyblack provides. For me, this meant finally splurging out and purchasing a new mountain bike to maximize riding on the captivating Taupo tracks. I also feel less conducive to burnout and have been getting into open source more recently. This is a quick check-in where I talk about my goals of 2019 and where I am now.
2nd July, 2019
Time to read: 2 mins.
For much of my life, I have been considering exactly what ratio of career to lifestyle is ideal. Even before University, I was pondering where and how I should be living. Career gives meaning and obviously the ability to afford lifestyle, but lifestyle allows you to find enjoyment, refresh your mind and give you something to progress on outside of work. There’s also the added benefit of being more physically healthy depending on your lifestyle activities.
This a balancing act that I believe is relative. Some people strive on being career driven, putting in 80-90 hours a week to succeed in business. It is not uncommon to come across these type of people, but at the same time, you have to realize that not everyone can maintain and get satisfaction from devoting so much into their career.
For this reason, I decided to quit my job in Matamata and pursue a job where I am free to do the activities I love to do. Such as mountain biking and running. Luckily I was able to find a job in one such place.
18th March, 2019
Time to read: 14 mins.
Although Google’s Open Source Lighthouse project was integrated into Chrome in early 2017, I had yet to explore and experiment with this feature. It was only after I accidentally stumbled upon it that I realized it provided me with new and interesting insights into my web apps.
For those unfamiliar, Lighthouse is a way to audit a webpage to get Performance, Progressive Web App, Accessibility, Best Practice and SEO feedback all from the comfort of Chrome. Go into the Audit panel in Developer Tools to test it out yourself. Make sure to run it in a private window so plugins don’t interfere!
This blog post is a reflection of what I have learned doing the audit on my portfolio website home page (https://jeremyshaw.co.nz/).
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