James L Milner's Blog

With two days to go before the end of the year and I realised that I have not written anything of substance this year on my blog (again, sigh).

For avoidance of any doubt, I have not released any software development or related books on any Amazon stores, nor do I currently intend to.

I had a realisation that it's been over a year since I posted anything on this blog and I've been wanting to rectify that for a while.

As some of you will know, I am a fan of TypeScript and have written a few blog posts previously that touch on the language.

I wrote a offhand tweet that picked up a (surprisingly) fair few likes about generating GeoJSON with OpenAI's (very in vogue) ChatGPT.

Having had it been a success for generating the CHANGELOG file in my project Terra Draw, I decide it would be good to share how that was achieved with the world.

Recently I have been exploring some other folks blog posts around a topic that really piqued my interest; property based testing.

Recently on my project Terra Draw I took a look at different ways to try and speed up the unit test suite.

Why # Pull request templates are a great way to give more structure to your open source project.

Recently on the Terra Draw website I wanted to add the ability to download a GeoJSON file - it struck me that I wasn't immediately aware how to do this with it exclusively being a client side app.

I am currently working on a new map drawing library called Terra Draw.

One problem I had with redoing my blog was noticing that the sidebar photo was causing a layout reflow.

post for myself for the future - a list of methods for converting between different color models.

In my last post I explained how to make a Map and Set that allowed you to use coordinates ([number, number] arrays) more like values than references.

One problem I was pondering recently is in the geospatial arena - somewhere I spend a lot of my time working.

This blog post will be a short overview of how you can use the Chrome Node inspector with TypeScript programs.

Another one in the short sharp blog posts that I am trying to do more of - this time on TypeScripts new Template Literal Types.

If I asked you to measure two points on a table, you might get out a ruler or a tape measure to tell me the distance between the two.

I've wanted to experiment with writing shorter and easier to digest blog posts on interesting web topics.

TypeScript provides a language which builds on top of JavaScript adding static types to help determine type mismatches at compile time (and even whilst you write!).

AssemblyScript takes a strict subset of TypeScript and allows it to be compiled to WebAssembly.

TypeScript has taken the web development world by storm, and I too am a fan.

I have been thinking recently about an aspect of software development which I feel can often be overlooked.

You may notice that I have not blogged in a while, at least not on this site.

In the browser, many operations occur on a single main thread.

In a past life I worked for the Ordnance Survey, specifically at the Geovation Hub in London working with startups doing interesting things with geospatial tools and data.

With this post I want to build upon a previous technique I wrote about; message passing with Service Workers.

Recently I've been writing about Web Workers and various options developers have for leveraging them in their applications.

What is scheduling?

There are often times in a web application where you need to send a request for the latest user input or interaction.

I was looking into how I might be able to improve the sharing experience on https://scratchthe.world, a digital scratch map PWA that I have been working.

Ever been on a web page and everything feels a bit slow?

As of late I've been thinking a lot about Service Workers (sorry if this is getting boring!)

As we move into a world where modern browsers are supporting the nearly the entire ES6 specification, we have a variety of data structures to use for storing and accessing our data as native built-in primitives.

Products have seen a resurgence of gradients in the past year or so.

In JavaScript we have two inbuilt functions for doing some work at some given point in the future.

It would be a fair assessment to state that Progressive Web Apps (often abbreviated to PWA) are a popular buzzword in the web development and JavaScript communities at the moment.

Wanting to explore more around geospatial tools with Go, this week I've been exploring Globe.

There has been an on going discussion about wether Icon Fonts or SVG Icons are 'better' for usage on the web.

In recent years, static sites have seen a resurgence.

Earlier today I tweeted something that I had been contemplating for a little while about cartograms.

Across many disciplines we are increasingly seeing the inflation in size of datasets.

Over the past month or so (on and off!)

Over recent times there has been a lot of stir around the growth of website assets and total transfer over the wire.

A curious thing struck me during the recent hype surrounding Pokemon Go.

You might have noticed my blog's had a bit of spring clean.

As geospatial datasets continue to increase in size, the necessity to be able to query and gain meaning from them efficiently has never been more important.

As spatial data sets have become larger, aggregated faster and from a wider variety of sources, handling large spatial datasets has become a challenge.

Over the past week I have made a start on looking back at the problem of transferring spatial data out of databases into front end applications.

At the beginning of June I wrote part one of 'Devangelism: Finding My Feet'.