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My Electric Campervan: The Struggle Bus

Living on the road with a little electric van, as an upgrade on bike nomad life, so I can carry all the machetes, chainsaws, spades, and mallets my charity needs, even when I'm injured.

Unf**king the Climate - Part 3: Waste

The third article in the Unf**king the Climate series is another "individual action" article, not because the entirety of the climate, biodiversity, and plastic crises are all entirely limited to what we do individually, but because there is little else in the world that we have control over than

Unf**king the Climate - Part 2: Food

Talking about food gets loud and ideological, but we're going to have a judgement free chat about livestock, flexitarianism, veganism, and my favourite: the invasivore diet. Let's fix the planet a little with our stomachs.

Unf**king the Climate - Part 1: What's the Problem?

Thank you for joining a growing number of people undertaking a personal mission to help solve the climate crisis. Every year the intensity of the climate crisis is more concerning, and more people want to do even more than ever before, but figuring out where to start, navigating between greenwashing

Angle Grinder Friction Fire

You know how it is. You're out and about in the middle of nowhere, and you're hungry. You've got pockets full of pork chops and plenty of deadwood, but you've forgotten your lighter, matches, even a flint and steel! Luckily, you've got an angle grinder with you!(?) Time to make

Misconceptions about tree planting

As somebody relatively new to woodland creation and restoration, I have been learning quickly thanks to being surrounded by experts in various fields. Before having a chance to listen and learn from those long involved in tree-planting and reforesting, I thought I knew more than I do now. I thought

2022 in Review: Restoring Ancient Woodlands, Vanlife, Bad Bikes, and Green Tech

It’s been another weird and wonderful year, and I wanted to reflect on that in a post. In the last few months of 2021 I quit my full time contract with Stoplight, which had been the end of a fantastic run of making the world of API design a

Only You Can Bring Modern OpenAPI Bundling to JavaScript

If you're familiar with OpenAPI you're probably familiar with "Bundling", also known by some as "Resolving" or "Dereferencing", "External Inlining"... there's a lot of names for this, but basically we are talking about pulling all the referenced parts of OpenAPI documents (linked together using $ref) into a single OpenAPI document.

Global Namespace Collision Detection in PHP

Namespaces have existed in PHP since version 5.3 to avoid two classes with the same name from different parts of the codebase conflicting with each other. Before namespaces you'd either hope it wasn't an issue, or name everything something horrendous like Acme_ModuleName_DirectoryName_ClassName. Nobody needs to tell

Checking Extensions on Laravel Sail and Vapor

One of the Protect Earth API volunteers was looking into using Laravel Excel to add "Download CSV" functionality to Protect Earth's amazing new Laravel Nova-powered backend to finally replace Airtable, and they said "It needs the GD extension, which I don't think Sail or Vapor have enabled?" Let's find out

OpenAPI v3.1 Resources for Tooling Developers

OpenAPI v3.1.0 has a bunch of great changes, solving problems like the subtle differences between JSON Schema objects and OpenAPI Schema objects, and adds support for Webhooks. Upgrading tooling can be tricky, but this should be a lot easier than the jump from v2 to v3.0. To

Going bike nomad (and nearly dying repeatedly) fixed my burnout!

In the middle of 2018 in NYC I was going through some rough burnout. I’d been working my ass off at a corporation I’d panicked into after two startups prior had gone bankrupt. I was refactoring a huge API ecosystem which was a house of cards, built on

Climate Action in Tech - Design, Code, and Hack the Environment Better

As the science-denial perpetrated omnishambles of 2020 continues, COVID-19 rages on whilst Europe gets hit by deadly storms and flash floods, wildfires are big enough to be called "gigafires", the Arctic refuses to freeze for the first time on record, thousands are displaced by flooding in Vietnam, and the only

Fixing Gatsby oEmbed Instagram Failures

I use gatsby-remark-oembed by Benedicte Raae, because it makes embedding Tweets, Instagram posts, YouTube videos, etc in Phil.Tech and Phil.Bike as simple as pasting in the URL. If it's hot, sit under a tree. If it's cold, put your jacket on. If it's raining, keep riding until you