Mike Babb @mikebabb@mastodon.technology

My “day in the life” post has been published on the Immersive Labs blog: https://careers.immersivelabs.com/2021/04/06/a-day-in-the-life-of-mike-lead-front-end-developer/ ✍️

This twitter thread sent me on a fun trip through the Wayback Machine to see old iterations of my personal website ⌛

"How long have you had your personal web site? What was its tech stack evolution?"

1️⃣ 2012: HTML/CSS/JS, manual FTP
2️⃣ 2016: WordPress with custom theme, manual FTP
3️⃣ 2018: Jekyll, manual SSH (scp all the things!)
4️⃣ 2020: Jekyll, Netlify

https://twitter.com/zachleat/status/1361066097668145153

Now that it has an Android app in beta, I've been giving Proton Calendar a go as an alternative to my self-hosted calendar setup. It's pretty good - nice design, auto light/dark mode, and all the features I need 📆

https://protonmail.com/blog/calendar-android-beta/

A year on from this post, Joplin continues to be my go-to app for staying organised. If you're looking for a good self-hosted Evernote/OneNote alternative, give it a try!

https://mikebabb.com/blog/work-and-life-management-with-joplin/

2020 was rough. If you wanna play through it again though, there’s https://2020game.io/ 🎮

As someone who spends a lot of time working with JavaScript and web apps, I take great satisfaction in maintaining a minimalist, JS-free personal website. I've added it to the 512KB Club, a sort of webring for similarly tiny sites ⚡

https://512kb.club

Reflective ramblings of a Tech Lead after a year in the job ✍️

https://mikebabb.com/blog/what-ive-learned-as-a-new-tech-lead/

At the weekend I listened to a podcast about GitHub's arctic code vault - such a cool idea! And it turns out I have code in it through my Nextcloud contributions 🏔

https://changelog.com/podcast/411
https://archiveprogram.github.com/

I like @Fairphone's approach to smartphones - modular, user-repairable phones you can get replacement parts and upgraded components for instead of replacing the whole thing. Much less waste and an ethical supply chain! I'll check out what they're offering next time I'm due an upgrade 📱

https://www.fairphone.com/it/2020/08/27/introducing-fairphone-3-plus/

New blog post: Automatic Dark Mode with CSS Variables https://mikebabb.com/blog/automatic-dark-mode-with-css-variables/ ✍️

Firefox for Android has gotten its big new release following a complete rebuild, with the GeckoView rendering engine and browser extension support. I've been using the beta for a while and it's a lot faster than old Firefox ⚡

https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2020/08/25/introducing-a-new-firefox-for-android-experience/

Dan Abramov has started a concise and entertaining glossary of JavaScript terms - https://whatthefork.is. A good addition to your RSS feed

Web developers, what's your build tool of choice these days? Might update my ageing Gulp 3 setup soon. I compile Sass, inject an SVG spritesheet, and run the standard CSS minification etc. No JavaScript in use on the site.

If there's a better way than Gulp for running these tasks I'm open to changing it. I've used webpack a lot but it feels like overkill for this. NPM scripts maybe?

Upgrading from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04 was quite straightforward, and the new release is great. I scribbled a few thoughts on it here: https://mikebabb.com/blog/ubuntu-20.04/

A brilliant comic explaining how smartphone contact-tracing can alert people to potential exposure to Covid-19 without location tracking or other data collection: https://ncase.me/contact-tracing/ #privacy #COVID19 #technology

Ubuntu 20.04 is now available, and it's looking like a great release! https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/feature-spotting-in-focal-fossa

As many of us make the switch to remote working for the forseeable future, Martin Fowler shares some thoughts on getting the most out of video calls: https://martinfowler.com/articles/effective-video-calls.html