Home on Alex Plescan

Here’s a little thing I’ve been building over the past few weeks: bigdraw.party.

A couple of weeks ago, my former colleagues competed in Brisbane’s Battle of the Tech Bands - and won!

I’ve got a Mac laptop and Linux desktop, and use the same keyboard, mouse, and monitor for both.

I use placeholder names often in my projects.

I first made this site back in 2016, and since then it hasn’t had any substantial updates to its design or overall structure.

A while back my friend recommended that I try WezTerm.

I was recently trying to figure out how likely a bunch of end-to-end tests were to be flaky, and wanted to gather some stats about their pass/fail rates on my local machine before including them in a broader test suite.

After publishing Easy SVG Sparklines last week, I received a couple of questions about how the timeseries data displayed on Mailgrip’s charts is generated.

Sparkline charts are compact, simple charts showing a general trend without getting into the nitty-gritty of a more complete solution.

Recently, I worked on embedding HTML emails into a web page for Mailgrip.

As part of my recent work on building Mailgrip, I decided to experiment with using Gumroad to manage payments and subscriptions.

A little while back I wanted to print a poster of Jack Barker’s Conjoined Triangles of Success (as featured in the Silicon Valley TV show).

If you’re reading this you probably already know what Metabase and Fly.io are.

💁‍♂️ Here's a tip for a quick way to manage private files in a git repository, using nothing but your shell and git.

Xcode 8 introduced managed code signing, which automatically generates the App IDs, signing certificates, and provisioning profiles you’d usually need to set up manually for your app.

After reading Brian Jordan’s post Emojify your Wi-Fi where he adds emoji to his Wi-Fi SSID, I decided to blatantly rip him off I got inspired to do the same on my Netgear R6300 router.

Apple’s new San Francisco Mono typeface comes bundled in with the latest Xcode 8 beta, and it’s beautiful!

iOS 9 introduced App Transport Security, which by default forces apps to communicate over HTTPS instead of HTTP.

Often while working on an iOS app there’s functionality that you want exposed only when the app is running in a Debug build configuration.

While building this website using Jekyll I found that there were a few places where I needed to override config variables when the site is running in a development environment.

SwiftLint is a great tool for enforcing code conventions in your Swift projects.