I've talked about doing a full rebuild of mikevdv.dev for years now. The site’s minimalist aesthetic - which was quite a statement when I launched it - has become so commonplace that I am regularly asked which UI library I use. Between that and the tech debt, ignoring the need for a rebuild was killing my interest in writing. Not ideal. The question was then, how I'd handle a rebuild... The previous version of the site had cost me close to £40 a month due to the database, all the lambdas and t

A few years ago I excitedly launched a new personal project, called NotAnotherCV. This post is my rambling, handwritten, goodbye to a system I loved building.

At the end of today, I will no longer work at PrettyLittleThing... I handed in my notice shortly before Christmas and at time of publication (19th of February 2025), we enter my final day. In my 4 and a half years at PLT, I've gone from a senior developer working at the ground level to being the principal lead of their supply chain tribe. I'm pleased to say that I've coached a number of developers through the early stages of their career, personally took part in hiring many team members, worked

Many months back now, I excitedly wrote up an article about custom twitter embeds. Much more recently, I wrote a follow up where I lamented the fact that I had redesigned the wheel with so much of my site and how leaving Twitter had impacted my reach. What followed was an extreemly busy period in my life with wedding planning, team lead responsibilities and a prolonged bout of madness wherin I decided I would learn nothing and attempt to build a fully hosted blogging solution that others could u

I write a large number of articles which I never end up publishing for various reasons. Quality is important to me so many articles end up in my "portfolio posts" directory on an external backup SSD, never to see the light of day again. I've produced a few articles which have done remarkably well, as well as others that don't perform to any kind of expectation, but I always make sure to ensure there's a story to tell. At the moment I'm writing this, I've not entirely considered what I'll title

Let me know if you've heard this one before. You have a function that is reading some sort of file (let's say a csv with a known format and no header line). You want to use streams so you can act on each line but you need to return a promise that resolves once the file has been fully read. Nine times out of ten, you've probably been wrapping the whole function up in a promise definition. I'd suspect something like the below code. // The data type we want from our csv type Child = { name: stri

While many junior Devs struggle with code reviews, both when performing and receiving them, I've found that even the more senior team members sometimes struggle with comments left on their code. The reasons for this are various, with junior devs not having the experience to know what they're looking for and comments being left often reading as criticism rather than the constructive feedback as which it was meant. Before I go any further, I want to say that this blog post is inspired by a post I

Yesterday around mid-day, mikevdv.dev was down. As was mikevdv.com, vandie.co.uk and many of my other domains for this website. My logging tool (Sentry) wasn't reporting any issues and this coincided with reports of issues on Cloudflare in my area as well as with many other services including Meta (Facebook) services. As such I wrote it off as widespread technical issues with major internet infrastructure and moved on with my day. My status checker was sending me emails every 10 minutes or so te

Remember the days that Apple used to pitch itself as David in the David and Goliath stories? Well, over the years, the tables have turned as safari has become like the IE of Old. Apple, in a short number of days, are going to intentionally kill off PWA support. It seems more and more I've been posting about the web getting worse rather than better, but this affects developers, businesses and users. When the documentation eventually emerged, Apple not only intentionally confused readers as to t

I've been building a homelab in my free time over recent months (alongside improving my smart home and building the next iteration of this blog). This Homelab runs TrueNas Scale and, as is recommended by anyone who uses TrueNas Scale, I use the TrueCharts Catalogue for apps as they are more flexible and updated more frequently. When working with TrueCharts, you likely want a reverse proxy to add SSL to any applications you have that might need to be web accessible. To do this TrueCharts official

Embedded advertisements get a bad rap. They have gotten more and more intrusive in recent years and I think its safe to say that most of us are either using Ad block explicitly or have developed some sort of subconscious filtering of their existence. Let's not even comment on the fact that most advertisements are a privacy nightmare, being targeted at you via mountains of collected data that you never explicitly consented to providing. Imagine my surprise today then, when I was browsing MDN and

I had promised myself that I wouldn't do anything work related as I prepare for my birthday tomorrow but when something big drops, I can't exactly ignore it. Meta has just dropped Threads, their new "Twitter Clone" and it's become popular almost immediately. It's reached 30 million sign ups in only 24 hours, if Mark Zuckerberg himself is to be believed. Elon Musk, on the other hand, is clearly feeling threatened as he has already suggested he will launch an, arguably frivolous, lawsuit against M

Those who have been following me for a while might know that while I'm no game developer, much like 90% of all other web devs, game development was my starting goal for getting into programming. Heck, I even went to a game development specialist school for my college education (Age 16-18 to avoid American confusion). Obviously, in hindsight, that wasn't the plan the world had for me... I had a brief foray back into that world when I spent the start of the pandemic working for a E-Sports Betting

The general advice is that a computer should last between 2 and 4 years. I've had the same computer for my home use since 2015. When I got it, it was worth more than I had ever even seen in a bank account. At the time I got it, it was a pretty amazing computer and I've never taken it for granted as a huge point of privilege to have had a machine like that for such a long time early on. It's been a mainstay through every professional role I've ever had. Work computers have been replaced by my emp

People who've been following me for a while will know that a key feature of my site has always been the dynamically generated CV button on the homepage. It's made it through multiple iterations and I'd like to think I've gotten pretty good at building that sort of thing. Something I've been asked for years however, is if I'd be willing to licence that to others so that they can have a dynamic CV on their own site. As you might by now have guessed, I have wonderful news for those people. In mid