If you were to look at my Steam library you would see that most of my games are strategy and logistics based (think Factorio) but with a healthy dose of transport methods and networks (think Transport Fever 2 and OpenTTD). I've always wanted a very specific, niche game focusing on building passenger networks that simulate how passengers travel - something I have never quite been satisifed with in OpenTTD, Transport Fever 2, and other games that I've played. I like the logistical challenge of moving cargo around, but it didn't interest me as much as the idea of moving people across a map. So, I ..read more

It's very common when working with TypeScript that you will have a type that declares a list of values, such as an enum or union type: enum SupportedColour1 {RED,YELLOW,BLUE,}type SupportedColour2 = 'RED' | 'YELLOW' | 'BLUE' And then you will often have functions that need to run differently or return different values based on what variant is passed in: function codeForColour1(colour: SupportedColour1): string {switch (colour) {case SupportedColour1.BLUE:return '#0000ff'case SupportedColour1.RED:return '#ff0000'case SupportedColour1.YELLOW:return '#ffff00'}}function codeForColour2(colour: S ..read more

I have used Vim or variants like Neovim ever since the second year of university, which means I've been using Vim for nearly 13 years (!). In that time I have gotten very comfortable navigating my way through code and codebases using Vim, and migrating to Neovim and its LSP setup has replicated an experience very close to what VS Code provides, but with all the benefits (in my opinion) of Vim. One feature that I have never been able to get confident with is code folding. I relied on it a lot during my roughly year long stint of VSCode + Vim mode but just could not get a satisifying configurati ..read more

Recently a computer upgrade went from one graphics card to a new case, new fans and a new graphics card. Along the way I learned a bunch and I'm writing this blog post for future reference when I next perform a PC upgrade. Check your graphics card fits the case I was upgrading from a very old, and small, GTX 1060 up to a very large GTX3080...naively assuming that my existing case would fit. It did not! Lesson learned is to measure or find online the GPU dimensions; all cases will specify the max size GPU that they support. Stock CPU coolers are loud I had been running the stock AMD CPU cooler ..read more

On every team at every company I've been at prior to my current role, the advice was simple: don't check your node_modules folder into your version control system (which I'll refer to as “Git” for the rest of this article…). This seemed like solid advice for multiple reasons: The code within node_modules isn't authored by the team directly. The code within node_modules is often quite large and would cause a lot of noise in git diffs and pull requests. The code within node_modules can easily be replicated with an npm install. I currently work at Google on the Chrome DevTools team and we check ..read more

Although occasionally you'll be given a task to complete which can be completed in no more than a few hours, most of your work is likely going to consist of features that will take multiple days or even weeks to complete. I've found that the longer a piece of work takes, the more likely I am to lose track of my progress, forget which part of the feature I was going to build next, or realise I've done work in the wrong order and have lost time because of it. Regardless of how easy or hard the new feature is to build, the longer it takes the more important it is to break the work down into manag ..read more

Last year I created Pomodone, a small time tracking application based on the Pomodoro technique of working in 25 minute intervals. It's a pretty basic app; it has a 25 minute timer (that runs in a Web Worker) and saves a history of your "poms" to a small Firebase database. I initially built it using React (well, Preact actually) but I then started to play around with Svelte, and decided rebuilding the app in Svelte might be a nice way to blog about the similarities and differences between the libraries. This is not a post declaring Svelte to be better than React, or vice-versa. This is a post ..read more

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be sharing some videos demonstrating parts of my workflow in VSCode - from managing changes with git (today's video), to reviewing pull requests, to running tests, and so on. Today I want to share how I use the VSCode Breadcrumbs with a handy keyboard shortcut and a bit of configuration to make jumping between files in the same directory really efficient: You can also watch this video directly on Youtube. If you've got any questions, comments, feedback, or just want to say hello, get in touch with me on Twitter ..read more

Since moving to Windows 10 something I've always struggled with is how to remap keys on a keyboard. I don't remap much, but one remapping that I've used now for about ten years is that I remap Caps Lock to ESC. This started when I was learning Vim, and has become so commited to muscle memory that I can't go back from it and I'm rendered useless on any machine that doesn't have this mapped! On Mac OS this remapping was easy; the keyboard settings lets you remap certain keys, and tools like Karabiner Elements offered far more control. On Windows however, I could never find a solution. I used unc ..read more

Back in October 2019 I'd taken the plunge and tried Windows for my development work. It was largely a succesful experiment. By using the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), I was able to run most of my tools effectively in Linux, something I'm familiar with, and with VSCode's WSL Remote plugin, I could run VSCode in Windows connected to the Linux environment provided by WSL, and things felt very familiar. Shortcomings of WSL That said, there were some minor issues and frustrations with WSL and this workflow. The main one was that WSL 1 was known to be much slower at file reads and writes. You m ..read more