Dave Taylor - Software Engineer

I’m a serial project starter, a twisted project starter?

Background With the decision to push the boundaries of what was possible with a local first predictive scheduling, I realised that it will be necessary to abstract the various background tasks for keeping the AI Prediction in the Browser using Vector Embe…

The Movement There is a big movement going on in the Local First circles to give users greater control over their data, greater performance and resilience.

Hoarding People’s Time and Energy I really struggle with this obsession within the digital and tech industry to lure everyone into a false expectation, that the more of their life they spend in a virtualised, surreal world the better things will become.

The 80% Schedule One of the most common pain-points I hear from the Music Teachers (VMT) that I have spoken to over the last few years has been planning student lesson schedules for the next school term.

Four years and counting It’s been almost four years now since I started on a side project to help Esther.

Scaling a company … Scaling a company when it graduates from that startup bubble is hard, painstakingly slow and fraught with obstacles and pit-holes.

The real challenge I like a challenge, some challenges are much harder than others.

Over the last year I have been working hard during my 20% time, behind the scenes, towards a basic working version of Soniq.

I’ve been trying to move some of the Soniq application logic into WebAssembly using wasm-pack.

I’m starting to add Invoicing capabilities to Soniq.

A while back I was researching JSON document to document transforms.

I’ve been doing a lot of research recently for Uniform on how to we might extract key data from API responses based on what type of information the current context is looking for.

This is the second part of a series where I go through my monorepo setup with Github Actions deploying to Vercel.

I have recently added wasm-pack builds into my Soniq project but found that it is a nightmare trying to get rustup and cargo installed in the Vercel build alongside my yarn monorepo.

I have recently come across the need to convert a ReadableStream to a String.

2022 has been a full year.

I really enjoyed meeting Matthias Endler yesterday.

What if you are using Next.js for your website but want to make use of Golang functionality written to support your backend APIs?

One of the promises of building with Uniform is that: providing personalised experiences is a simple, and natural part of working with website content.

I’ve published my Uniform components TypeScript generation scripts to a cli package @davetayls/uniform-codegen.

This site was born in 2009, that’s over ten years now.

I have played the guitar ever since I was little.

I have used the likes of Figma and often wondered how they used Wasm (or WebAssembly) to power the GUI.

There is no doubt in my mind that WASM will become a large part of my future toolkit.

NextJs is very useful for creating static websites but how do you configure it if you are building a single page application (SPA)?

I think instrumental teachers have it pretty hard sometimes.

When deploying anything other than a simple POC or personal website, a reliable application will need Environments.

I have found it super easy to add Uniform Canvas to a bare-bones NextJs app.

I found in the bundle analysis that I was loading the CMS editor components into the _app chunk unnecessarily.

The Lighthouse report says that the page is only using 1/3 of the JavaScript within the main _app file.

Looking at the lighthouse report it shows that there is a lot of unused JavaScript on the homepage.

It’s time to do a review of my site performance.

Over the last year we have seen the rise of Languages like Rust running in the browser through the use of Web Assembly (or WASM).

Uniform have just launched its new platform and a big part of that is Canvas.

TypeScript has been around for several years now and over that time has gone from something people scoffed at to an integral part of many open source projects and frameworks.

I have been using Firebase again recently to build a simple app for Esther who is a Piano teacher.

It can be hard making decisions, especially when they affect multiple teams and a large number of developers.

Coordinating therapies and progress for a disabled child is extremely hard.

How do you implement some UI state which can be changed from different parts of your React application?

As your application grows you will want to separate out JavaScript from your main bundle.

Since posting some thoughts on more sustainable technology I have been made more aware of others who have been working for a number of years now at raising awareness of how our technology choices (and habits) affect everyone.

I’m struck by the urgency of the state of the natural world after watching David Attenborough’s recent Netflix programs.

Hello everyone, this is a professional update giving a bit of background to what I’ve been involved with recently.

This website has been my place for thoughts and experiments, ideas and memories for close to a decade.

Deploying JAMstack within an enterprise company comes with many complications due to it’s scale.

One of the big challenges I have found going into a management role is finding ways to help the people in my team develop their skills and their career.

In this post I want to go beyond React and Redux and explore ways in which we can improve the readability of our code by creating a rich domain of types that describe the data better.

Thanks to everyone who came to the Bath Digital Festival lunchtime events.

I’ve been looking at the possibilities of a simple middleware pipeline script.