Damian Nicholson

There’s something deeply satisfying about finishing a day covered in dust, aching in places you forgot existed, and being able to point at a flat, level surface and say “I did that.”

When I rebuilt this blog from scratch, I had a choice.

There’s a question that comes up at almost every good dinner party: if you could invite anyone in history to sit at your table, who would you pick?

If you use SSH regularly on macOS, configuring 1Password as your SSH agent is a nice upgrade.

Back in 2012, my journey into coffee started in a fairly unassuming way, with an Aeropress.

The recent layoffs associated with Tailwind have sparked a lot of discussion, much of it blending together two related but distinct things: Tailwind as an open source project and Tailwind as a commercial business.

I’ve been using the FlexiSpot E7 Pro for a while now and it’s been a really solid desk overall.

Here is how I track my councils bin collection schedule in Home Assistant using the REST sensor. # configuration.yaml sensor: - platform: rest name: Bin collection resource: https://www.southtyneside.gov.uk/apiserver/ajaxlibrary/ method: PO…

I’ve been doing web development for over a decade now and every now and again I learn something new that surpises me.

Creating a layout like Pinterest is impossible without JavaScript.

After a few years of blogging using Jekyll it began to lose its lustre.

When building reusable UI components, it’s common that you want to be able to do something in response to a user action.

I’ve wrote a couple posts on git over the years so I thought I’d share another snippet sitting in my .gitconfig which I find particularly useful when working across multiple branches, as I tend to forget where I last left off.

Last week I had the privilege of speaking at FrontEndNorth in Sheffield.

At the beginning of 2017 I wrote down this list of goals for the year.

Last Tuesday I had the privilege of sharing my experiences and thoughts on how to handle clientside validation at this months JavaScript North East meetup.

I have long believed Ruby’s inject to be under appreciated as it’s super flexible.

One of the main reasons I believe Git to be so well adopted is its flexibility.

On Thursday I had the pleasure of speaking at this months Frontend NE about Chromme DevTools.

Programmers do their best to write prose in the same way that they write code - clearly and concisely.

When I tell people that I work from home as a remote employee, most say one of two things: That would never work for me!

Batch file renaming is a common job for a developer.

This past couple weeks I’ve been sifting through CVs for the frontend developer we’re looking to hire at Conferize.

When building any REST based applications in Rails, it’s common to create a routes.js or paths.js file containing URL helpers so your client side JavaScript components can render links or construct AJAX requests for the correct endpoint.

I read seven books in 2016, and of those, I’d recommend only the first three that I’ve listed here.

The Martian - Andy Weir I don’t tend to read fiction but I bought this on impulse as it was recommended by friends and also name dropped on the Tim Ferriss podcast.

It’s sometimes useful to be able to perform a page redirect using AngularJS low-level $window API.

In order of priority I’ve outlined my main reasons for attending a technical conference.

My original take on CoffeeScript wasn’t exactly favourable.

A little over a week ago I had the pleasure of speaking at Scotland.js, a two day JavaScript conference hosted in the centre of Edinburgh.

If the title if this post isn’t enough of a giveaway, I’ve retired my iPhone 4S and purchased a Nexus 4.

Last week I had the pleasure of giving a talk on Jasmine at JavaScript North East(JSNE).

Two weeks ago I had the pleasure of going to jQuery UK in Oxford.

I should point out that both the original idea and implementation came from Richard Bradshaw.

Yesterday I discovered what I thought to be a bug in jQuery.

We all know the benefits of adhering to web standards, but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a laborious process manually checking the validity of each page within a site or web app using the online W3C validation service or a browser extension.

I’m not normally one for CSS experiments, but after reading a few chapters of Hardboiled Webdesign on the plane journey back from Mexico, I had the urge to try out some CSS transitions.

So CoffeeScript has been on my radar for some time now, and unfortunately it hasn’t piqued my interest as much as other Ruby developers I know.

I released my first ruby gem, cineworld in to the wild a couple weeks ago.

If you’d asked me six months ago my stance on alternative templating engines, you would have heard me say something along the lines of ‘I can’t see the point in them.

As promised, the codebase that powers the Nearest Cineworld is now on GitHub.

As an avid cinema goer, I’m always checking the Cineworld website to see whats showing at my local venue.

In no particular order, here are my top 10 most useful Ruby Gems as of March 2011.

Git users - do this happen to you?

Here’s a little gotcha that I came across when parsing Date strings for insertion into a mysql date field. puts Date.parse('12/10/2010') puts Date.parse('12/1/2010') In Ruby 1.8.7 you’ll get the following output: 2010-12-10 2010-12-01 Though in Ruby 1.9…

I first signed up to Gowalla early this year, but left my account untouched, just to see whether any of location based services would catch on.

In development, the application was working fine.

A snippet of my nginx config file showing how to rewrite all urls from www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com.

The need to perform synchronous AJAX calls sometimes arises, for example if your passing tokens back and forth for security reasons.

A rule of thumb that has worked well for me is that if I’m excited to play around with something, it probably doesn’t belong in production.