Hiring good people is incredibly hard, and despite what it might feel like, hiring is one of the most difficult tasks you will be required to do at work. It’s a process fraught with pitfalls, subconscious biases, and dead ends. It takes valuable time away from the day-to-day work that somehow still has to get done. It consumes a huge amount of time…

TL;DR Take a look at the .gitlab-ci.yml configuration file in my recent safe-env-vars project. This shows how I configured GitLab’s built-in CI/CD pipelines to automatically build and publish the package to npm. This post will explain the steps required to set this up in detail. What’s in a pipeline? Long before GitHub joined the party with GitHub…

TL;DR Environment variables aren’t always what you expect and it’s painful to check each one. Instead, use a library such as safe-env-vars to do the hard work and be safe in the knowledge your environment variables won’t cause you any headaches. Oh, what? Environment variables are easy, you say, we’ve been working with environment variables for our…

At the end of 2021 I decided it was time to update my tired old personal website. I’d had my existing site for several years, probably over five years if I remember correctly, and it was getting long in the tooth to say the least. It was also pretty simple, with just a photo, some links to social media, and a short blurb. Not much to be proud of…