Articles



Run report: To the Top of Corfu

May 26, 2022

πŸ•‘7 min read
πŸƒRun
A 33 km off-road trail run from the Corfiot sea side town of Roda, to the highest point on the island, Mount Pantokrator at (911 metres (2,989 ft)). A beautiful route, through olive groves, tiny villages, with views to die for, but took longer than estimat...

Fixing issues with NextJS local file APIs and Netlify functions

May 17, 2022

πŸ•‘2 min read
Recently I migrated my personal website to Next.js and thought I had everything working well with Netlify, however on deployment I noticed an issue with the API data... Background As part of my migration from Gatsby to Next.js I moved the .gpx data to a ...

Type narrowing and discriminating unions in TypeScript

May 10, 2022

πŸ•‘3 min read
Type narrowing is the process of moving from a less precise set of types to a more precise type or set of types. The aim of type narrowing is to reduce the types down to only the ones where the following methods or properties can be correctly accessed or c...

Putting the `S` in SOLID JavaScript

Feb 16, 2021

πŸ•‘4 min read
S - Single-Responsibility Principle (SRP) is the first design principal covered by SOLID principals. SOLID is an Object oriented design principal. It stands for: The principals were originally created and promoted by Robert Martin (aka Uncle Bob). S -...

Getting started with Blender

Feb 13, 2021

πŸ•‘4 min read
I recently picked up 3d modelling after quite a few years away. I have not used Blender before so learning the basics involved many seaches and skimming videos to fine what I needed. This post is a quick guide to getting started with blender that I have cr...

React and Material UI (MUI)

Jan 8, 2021

πŸ•‘7 min read
When I first used Material UI, I struggled with a few concepts. I've written this quick overview to help get my head around it, and hopefully guide others to a quicker start. I'm going to make a new project and then create some (horrible) styles! Create ...

Formatting percentage values with JavaScript Intl

Jan 5, 2021

🧠Tip
Javascript contains an Internationalisation API that you can use to format numbers to a user's locale. Setting the style to percent is all that is needed. Note: A value of 1 will return 100% because 1x anything is 100%! To specify the decimal places use ...

Formatting currency with JavaScript Intl

Dec 17, 2020

πŸ•‘1 min read
🧠Tip
JavaScript's Internationalization API allows you to format currency. It takes the locale and options to configure the currency we're using. The options require the style to be set to currency and a currency option to specify the unit type, as this is retur...

Strava API activity sync with Axios, React, Redux & Saga - part 2

Dec 16, 2020

πŸ•‘6 min read
With the auth and state setup from part 1 of "Strava API activity sync with Axios, React, Redux & Saga" we can now progress to getting the activities and displaying them in a table. Overview Now we have tokens we can start to get the data from Strava. Th...

Strava API activity sync with Axios, React, Redux & Saga - part 1

Dec 13, 2020

πŸ•‘10 min read
Why? I've been using Strava for over 5 years to track my activities, and more recently analyse them too. Towards the end of 2019 I realised that I was getting close to running 1,000km in a year, so I started a basic spreadsheet to track the data so that I...

Getting user locale with JavaScript

Nov 24, 2020

πŸ•‘1 min read
🧠Tip
To get a user's prefered locale we can query the navigator.language. To change your language in Chrome go to chrome://settings/languages and add/edit the list of languages. To get the full list of user languages we can use navigator.languages. This retur...