Goodbye, Dad.

My father passed away in mid-March. It wasn't expected. He'd not been well, but we were expecting the next thing to be another visit to hospital, not death. When it came time for the funeral, I wasn't able to give a eulogy. In that situation nobody wants to listen to

mbsync, SASL and Gmail

Slightly more esoteric than usual; I'm posting this for my benefit as much as anyone else's! I was just trying to set up mbsync to work with Gmail. I'd got most of the config copied from another provider, but kept getting an error about an invalid parameter: Error performing SASL

One Small Step...

If there is anyone following me, you might have noticed that I haven’t really posted anything lately. The reason is simple — there’s been so much going on at home that I haven’t had any brain space to write. There have been days when I could manage to

My Apple purchase regrets

I read an interesting article by Mark Ellis the other day which got me thinking about my biggest Apple purchasing regret. To be clear up-front, I’m very happy with most of their devices, and quite snug in their ecosystem. While they do have their faults I’m happier to

Things I wish I knew about… JavaScript modules

I have to confess it took me a while to get my head around JavaScript modules. This is at least partly because there are two different popular module systems, CommonJS and ECMAScript 2015 (usually shortened to ES2015). The ECMAScript 2015 standard is newer than CommonJS. Personally I find it more

JavaScript pattern - the “singleton file”

The other day I came across the solution to a number of problems I’d had in the past. I imagine it’s probably obvious to anyone who’s been doing JavaScript for a while, but since it took a while to dawn on me I thought I’d try

Live reload in Hapi

Something I’ve been meaning to address for a while is the lack of a livereload plugin for Hapi. Template changes are visible on manual reload if you turn off caching, but I’ve become used to automatic reloading when developing with Vue. livereload architectureThe full livereload protocol is available

Making a macOS app

There are some things I’ve been wanting to write for a while that just don’t make sense as a web app. Since I’m primarily using macOS now (for leisure at least), I want a macOS app. After much digging and despairing, the best solution I’ve found

My 11 favourite Vim plugins

While I’m spending most of my JavaScript writing time in WebStorm these days, I still use Vim a lot. Over time I’ve found some great plugins, extending Vim to cope with an amazing amount of stuff. I should note that these are all essentially general purpose plugins. Some