Feed - Phil Nash

Build a contact form with Astro and Resend 🔗

I try to keep my email address from appearing on public websites to avoid spam. But I do like people to be able to contact me if they have something I [...]

Generate AI-powered related links for your Astro content 🔗

Showing related posts beneath a blog post is a great way to give your visitors more to read and encourage them to spend more time on your site. Existi [...]

I built a new app and I don't know how I feel about it 🔗

Much like almost every other developer on the planet, I have been trying to work out my relationship with coding agents. I have been using AI-assisted [...]

5 quick tips for giving better presentations 🔗

I have been speaking publicly at developer conferences for over a decade and in that time I’ve seen plenty of other people giving talks. Everyone give [...]

Things you need to do for npm trusted publishing to work 🔗

After the recent supply chain attacks on the npm ecosystem, notaby the Shai-Hulud 2.0 worm, GitHub took a number of actions to shore up the security o [...]

How wrong can a JavaScript Date calculation go? 🔗

The Date object in JavaScript is frequently one that causes trouble. So much so, it is set to be replaced by Temporal soon. This is the story of an is [...]

How to Create Vector Embeddings in Python 🔗

When you’re building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) app, the first thing you need to do is prepare your data. You need to: collect your unstru [...]

Troubles with multipart form data and fetch in Node.js 🔗

This is one of those cathartic blog posts. One in which I spent several frustrating hours trying to debug something that really should have just worke [...]

Clean up HTML Content for Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Readability.js 🔗

Scraping web pages is one way to fetch content for your retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) application. But parsing the content from a web page can [...]

Shallow clones versus structured clones 🔗

Have you ever had one of those times when you think you’re doing everything right, yet still you get an unexpected bug in your application? Particular [...]

How to Create Vector Embeddings in Node.js 🔗

When you’re building a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) app, job number one is preparing your data. You’ll need to take your unstructured data and [...]

How to Chunk Text in JavaScript for Your RAG Application 🔗

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications begin with data, so getting your data in the right shape to work well with vector databases and larg [...]

How Using Fetch with the Streams API Gets You Faster UX with GenAI Apps 🔗

Generative AI enables us to build incredible new types of applications, but large language model (LLM) responses can be slow. If we wait for the full [...]

JavaScript is getting array grouping methods 🔗

Grouping items in an array is one of those things you’ve probably done a load of times. Each time you would have written a grouping function by hand o [...]

Node.js includes built-in support for .env files 🔗

With the recent release of version 20.6.0, Node.js now has built-in support for .env files. You can now load environment variables from a .env file in [...]

Easy and accessible pagination links for your Astro collections 🔗

Generating pagination links is not as straightforward as it may seem. So, while rebuilding my own site with Astro, I released a <Pagination /> compone [...]

Build bots on Bluesky with Node.js and GitHub Actions 🔗

Bluesky is the new social network in town and it’s an exciting place to explore right now. I was fortunate enough to get an invite early on and take p [...]

Create a CLI Chatbot with the ChatGPT API and Node.js 🔗

ChatGPT has taken the world by storm and this week OpenAI released the ChatGPT API. I’ve spent some time playing with ChatGPT in the browser, but the [...]

The yaml document from hell — JavaScript edition 🔗

I recently came across this blog post from Ruud van Asseldonk titled “The yaml document from hell”. I’ve always heard that yaml has its pitfalls, but [...]

Better two factor authentication experiences with WebOTP 🔗

Two factor authentication (2FA) is a great way to improve the security of user accounts in an application. It helps protect against common issues with [...]

Alias your Mastodon username to your own domain with Jekyll 🔗

Mastodon is different to most online services. It is a federated network, so when you set up an account you need to choose a server to use. Your usern [...]

How to use the Bitly API in Ruby 🔗

Link shortening has been around for a long time and Bitly is arguably the king of the link shorteners. It has support for shortening long URLs as well [...]

Don't ever write your own function to parse URL parameters 🔗

Sometimes the platform we are building on provides more functionality than we can keep in our own heads. However, depending on the problem, we often f [...]

Restart your app and not your tunnel with ngrok and nodemon 🔗

When I am developing web applications in Node.js, I like the server to restart when I make changes, so I use nodemon. When I am developing an applicat [...]

How to display dates in your user's time zone with the Intl API 🔗

Time zones are hard. Not only are there a lot of them, but they don’t fit nicely into whole hour blocks, daylight savings time changes individual zone [...]

How to stream file downloads in Node.js with Got 🔗

Got is a Node.js library for making HTTP requests. It has both promise and stream based APIs and in this post I want to explore how to use the stream [...]

I built a VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode 🔗

Over the Easter weekend, a four day weekend characterised by lockdowns all over the world, I decided to use the extra time I had at home to start a ne [...]

Making a responsive Twitch Embed 🔗

I’ve been trying out streaming live code on Twitch which is a lot of fun. I wanted to share on my own site that I was streaming so I have built a page [...]

The story of a mildly popular Ruby gem 🔗

The list on GitHub of repositories that depend on your repository is scary. There’s something nice about writing and releasing a library, module, Ruby [...]

Mistakes I've made treating file paths as strings 🔗

Some things you do as a developer can work for you for years, then turn around and bite you when you were least expecting. These are the things that y [...]

How to find CFPs for developer conferences 🔗

So you’ve decided to speak at a developer conference? You have a story you want to share with your peers—how you built something, how you learned some [...]

Testing signed and encrypted cookies in Rails 🔗

Recently I’ve been refactoring the tests for a gem I maintain and I needed to test that it sets the right cookies at the right time. But the cookies i [...]

How not to sort an array in JavaScript 🔗

Array sorting is one of those things you don’t spend too long thinking about, until it stops working for you. Recently I was working with array of ite [...]

How to start a Node.js project 🔗

Sometimes I write blog posts to remind myself what I’ve learned and sometimes I write them because someone else shares something and I want to remembe [...]

2018 in review 🔗

I’ve never been one for writing a review of my year. This year I’ve found myself not only reading, but comparing myself to others’ reviews. I realised [...]

Service workers: beware Safari's range request 🔗

You’ve implemented a service worker to cache some assets. Everything is working well, your service worker is a success, you’re feeling good. But then… [...]

Techniques for animating on the canvas in React 🔗

I recently experimented with audio visualisation in React on the Twilio blog. While I meant to teach myself more about the web audio API I found that [...]

Implementing one time passwords in Crystal 🔗

Crystal is still a young language, there aren’t a lot of libraries available yet. For some this could be offputting, but for others this is a chance t [...]

Git commands to keep a fork up to date 🔗

I’ve seen the following tweet about git making its way around Twitter recently: I ❤️ Git. But honestly, it intimidated me for years. I thought I neede [...]

Spring clean your dev machine 🔗

Development machines can build up such a lot of cruft. Old versions, oudated programs and unused caches litter the hard drive. It’s good to take time [...]

Use the web share API easily with web components 🔗

I’m a fan of the web share API but I was not happy with my initial implementation of the API. It was all a bit complex for what is a very simple API. [...]

CSS: select first-of-class with the subsequent sibling combinator 🔗

There are a whole bunch of CSS selectors available to web developers, but sometimes there’s still not enough. I found this recently when building the [...]

gzip a file in Ruby 🔗

At the start of the year I looked into how to better compress the output of a Jekyll site. I’ll write up the results to that soon. For now, here’s how [...]

Permissions on the web suck 🔗

I am a fan of progressive web apps and the powers that they bestow on web developers to build the next generation of applications. We can write web ap [...]

Two tests you should run against your Ruby project now 🔗

I had the fortune of attending the wonderful Brighton Ruby conference last week. It was full of excellent advice, wisdom and code. There was one talk, [...]

Experimenting with the background fetch API 🔗

The service worker API is expanding as more ways to use the background dwelling worker emerge. I’ve written before about push notifications and backgr [...]

Speed up bundle install with this one trick 🔗

Did you know bundler can download and install gems in parallel? That’s right, using the --jobs option for bundle install means you can set the number [...]

Always install Bundler alongside Ruby with rbenv 🔗

Here’s a quick tip for anyone who uses rbenv and ruby-build to manage installing and switching Ruby versions. When installing a new version of Ruby I [...]

The web share API 🔗

Recently I implemented the web share API for my site as a means of testing it out. If you are using version 55 or above of Chrome on Android then you [...]

Doing things wrong 🔗

I wrote a blog post last week and bits of it were wrong. This is not a retraction of that blog post, I just wanted to share the feedback that I got, t [...]

A toast to ES2015 destructuring 🔗

I think the ES2015 destructuring syntax is pretty cool. It might not grab the headlines like Promises, Generators or the class syntax, but I find it r [...]

On fixing a favicon 🔗

Sometimes open source work is just fixing one tiny thing that bugs you. However, rolling up your sleeves and delving into even the smallest amount of [...]

Dev Tools Tricks: Store objects and elements as variables in the console 🔗

Browser dev tools are so full of features it’s hard to keep up. I bet every developer knows a different set of features to each other. I wanted to sha [...]

Git back to the future 🔗

Git may be the best version control software I’ve used but it is a complex beast and makes it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Recently, however, I [...]

A community offers to help 🔗

Last week I was blown away by the response to a problem I was experiencing from maintainers of two of the larger open source projects in the Ruby worl [...]

Install a service worker declaratively 🔗

There’s been some interesting updates in service workers recently. The big news is that the Microsoft Edge development version now has service workers [...]

August is iOS month 🔗

June saw me ask for your help as I started to learn Swift. July was busy with travel. Now August is iOS month. I’m lucky that part of my job as a deve [...]

This site isn't finished 🔗

No running site is ever completely finished. This one is no exception. There is more to build, more to style and more to write. It’s a challenge. Welc [...]

Phil Nash