A cautionary tale about inheriting old code and leaving it vulnerable to SQL injection — Last week, one of the websites I built in my spare time a while back suddenly started throwing errors. It couldn’t connect to the database for some reason, and this has never happened before. I tried connecting via MySQL Workbench to diagnose it, but I couldn’t log in. …

Look out that window and what do you see? A game that is both visually stunning and mentally uplifting. — For the last 5 months, like the majority of people working from home thanks to Covid-19, I’ve been sat at my desk at home surrounded by plain white walls and a boring main road outside my window. Being at home and not being able to socialise with colleagues has certainly…

Improving disk performance in your dev container environment with named volumes — What Are VS Code Dev Containers? Visual Studio Code Remote Containers is a VS Code extension that solves one of software engineering’s oldest problems: “But it works on my machine.” Dev containers also allow you to close the gap between your development and production environments, making it much easier to debug production issues.

Order entries the easy way — I’ve recently started experimenting with Contentful as a headless CMS for a Gatsby based website. So far I’m impressed with how powerful the combination is. …

Optimising the build and deploy process to be just as fast as Gatsby Cloud — I host all my websites on AWS, whether it’s an old PHP based website or a Next.js based website which now lives in an EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) cluster or static based sites using Amazon S3 and CloudFront. Gatsby has fast become one of the most popular frameworks for building…

Server-side rendering vs. static site generators — Occasionally, Developers Get It Wrong It’s rare, but it happens. We love using the latest technology and exploring the latest frameworks. Greenfield projects are a great opportunity for trying something totally new, often using the old “using the right technology for the project” excuse even if you don’t fully understand whether it is, in fact…

As someone who has been put on furlough, here are my thoughts on how companies should approach it — What is “furlough” here in the UK? Under the UK government’s Job Retention scheme (“furlough”) set up to help during the current epidemic, companies have the option to furlough their staff instead of having to make people redundant to keep the business from going bankrupt. The government will pay furloughed workers 80% of their salary, capped at…