I’m starting a newsletter called Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan and Derelict where I’ll begin to publish a short story once every other week. This is a place to help me learn how to write dialogue and think about character development and encourage me to write a little more. The name of this series comes from the nautical...

Since my early childhood I believed that I was a New Yorker in exile. The atmosphere, the energy; I gobbled up every part of it that leaked through a TV or found its way to me via magazines, posters and books. I felt that not only had I the misfortune to have been born in the wrong country with the wrong accent but...

I’ve been obsessed with blend modes over the past couple of weeks. First it started when I noticed how the Almanac was missing both mix-blend-mode and background-blend-mode so I went ahead and fixed that. Even though I’d been through the docs and traversed MDN thoroughly for these posts I very almost missed that...

Working on a project with a styleguide for the first time is encouraging me to document my code a lot more than I usually do. It’s also surprising to reveal how little I truly understand about the complexities of CSS and writing code for other developers to work with. In other projects I’ve often been under an...

It’s been eleven weeks of these little notes and so much has changed over that time. I’m not really sure who’s reading them but hey these are really just for me to push myself to getting stuff done each week. In fact it’s sort of liberating if no-one’s reading because it means I can be a bit more candid than usual....

This week I was recovering from a fever/cold/nightmare illness that left me with an awful lot of email and unfinished tasks ready for next week so unfortunately nothing much happened of note. I did help write a primer on BEM though; it organises all of the current thinking about modular CSS and why we might want to...

This week I’ve been in Nottingham working with the team at Kind on a freelance gig. What’s particularly interesting is that this is the first project I’ve worked on that’s been styleguide-first—so before a single mockup is visible in the browser we’ve normalised the design into a programmatic language, written clear...

The last fornight has been exceptionally busy so I sort of missed out on last week’s post, but I’ve finally managed to find a spare moment and so here it is in all its unedited glory: Typographica published a collection of typeface reviews from the best releases of 2014 and I was thrilled to contribute with my...

On Monday I published an article about the HTML5 History API. It’s sort of crazy to think that I contribute to CSS-Tricks on a daily basis now, especially since I’ve been following Chris’ work for almost a decade. Back when I just started web development I had become immediately intoxicated by his website’s...

This week I’ve been messing around with a few side projects after a month of heavy freelance work and subsequently I’ve been trying to play catch up with the backlog of articles, talks and posts about front-end development that I’ve let slip by. Earlier in the week I also found some time to write a little about YOU...

There are stories that appear to grasp all of my thoughts and loves and ideas right out of thin air and hurl them onto the pages of a book. These moments are few and far between but lately I had that very experience with You, a novel about video game design written by Austin Grossman. It’s a book that appeared to...

I’m feeling pretty guilty about what I’ve accomplished over the past seven days; right now I’m at that troubling stage of freelance work (which I assume everyone passes through at one stage or another) where I’ve promised far too much to people. Setting high expectations of myself and my work is important, yet...