Phil Nash

I try to keep my email address from appearing on public websites to avoid spam.

Showing related posts beneath a blog post is a great way to give your visitors more to read and encourage them to spend more time on your site.

Much like almost every other developer on the planet, I have been trying to work out my relationship with coding agents.

I have been speaking publicly at developer conferences for over a decade and in that time I’ve seen plenty of other people giving talks.

After the recent supply chain attacks on the npm ecosystem, notaby the Shai-Hulud 2.0 worm, GitHub took a number of actions to shore up the security of publishing packages to hopefully avoid further attacks.

The Date object in JavaScript is frequently one that causes trouble.

When you’re building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) app, the first thing you need to do is prepare your data.

This is one of those cathartic blog posts.

Scraping web pages is one way to fetch content for your retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application.

Have you ever had one of those times when you think you’re doing everything right, yet still you get an unexpected bug in your application?

When you’re building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) app, job number one is preparing your data.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications begin with data, so getting your data in the right shape to work well with vector databases and large language models (LLMs) is the first challenge you’re likely to face when you get started building.

Generative AI enables us to build incredible new types of applications, but large language model (LLM) responses can be slow.

Grouping items in an array is one of those things you’ve probably done a load of times.

With the recent release of version 20.6.0, Node.js now has built-in support for .env files.

Generating pagination links is not as straightforward as it may seem.

Bluesky is the new social network in town and it’s an exciting place to explore right now.

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and this week OpenAI released the ChatGPT API.

I recently came across this blog post from Ruud van Asseldonk titled “The yaml document from hell”.

Two factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to improve the security of user accounts in an application.

Mastodon is different to most online services.

Link shortening has been around for a long time and Bitly is arguably the king of the link shorteners.

Sometimes the platform we are building on provides more functionality than we can keep in our own heads.

When I am developing web applications in Node.js, I like the server to restart when I make changes, so I use nodemon.

Time zones are hard.

Got is a Node.js library for making HTTP requests.

Over the Easter weekend, a four day weekend characterised by lockdowns all over the world, I decided to use the extra time I had at home to start a new project and learn a new skill.

I’ve been trying out streaming live code on Twitch which is a lot of fun.

The list on GitHub of repositories that depend on your repository is scary.

Some things you do as a developer can work for you for years, then turn around and bite you when you were least expecting.

So you’ve decided to speak at a developer conference?

Recently I’ve been refactoring the tests for a gem I maintain and I needed to test that it sets the right cookies at the right time.

Array sorting is one of those things you don’t spend too long thinking about, until it stops working for you.

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself what I’ve learned and sometimes I write them because someone else shares something and I want to remember that better.

I’ve never been one for writing a review of my year.

You’ve implemented a service worker to cache some assets.

I recently experimented with audio visualisation in React on the Twilio blog.

Crystal is still a young language, there aren’t a lot of libraries available yet.

I’ve seen the following tweet about git making its way around Twitter recently: I ❤️ Git.

Development machines can build up such a lot of cruft.

I’m a fan of the web share API but I was not happy with my initial implementation of the API.

There are a whole bunch of CSS selectors available to web developers, but sometimes there’s still not enough.

At the start of the year I looked into how to better compress the output of a Jekyll site.

I am a fan of progressive web apps and the powers that they bestow on web developers to build the next generation of applications.

I had the fortune of attending the wonderful Brighton Ruby conference last week.

The service worker API is expanding as more ways to use the background dwelling worker emerge.

Did you know bundler can download and install gems in parallel?

Here’s a quick tip for anyone who uses rbenv and ruby-build to manage installing and switching Ruby versions.

Recently I implemented the web share API for my site as a means of testing it out.

I wrote a blog post last week and bits of it were wrong.