engineering

22 Apr 2026, BST · 12 min read

Playwright E2E testing AI skills: JavaScript London talk

Using Playwright and the playwright-explore-website skill to test real user journeys

Companion post for my JavaScript London talk at NewDay on 29 April 2026, covering how Playwright and the playwright-explore-website skill support E2E testing, exploratory QA, and browser debugging.

22 Apr 2026, BST · 6 min read

The playwright-explore-website Copilot skill

From the awesome-copilot example to a stricter Playwright MCP workflow

How I set up a personal playwright-explore-website GitHub Copilot skill, starting from the awesome-copilot example and adding MCP bootstrap instructions, stricter rendered-UI review rules, safer browser exploration, and cleaner Playwright session outputs.

21 Apr 2026, BST · 27 min read

Building a tag system in Astro

Slug normalisation, tag clouds, ring layouts, paginated archives, and tag page improvements

How this blog's tag system works: from tag slug normalisation and publication-aware counts to the weighted cloud on the blog archive, the ring layout on /tags, paginated tag pages, the sidebar browser, and later improvements including per-tag descriptions, a featured post, related topics, and a stats bar.

16 Apr 2026, BST · 13 min read

Designing the blog card and post hero

Reading time, cover assets, and the shared contract from card to hero

How the blog listing card and post hero share reading time, cover assets, metadata, and a single visual system from the grid to the full article page.

14 Apr 2026, BST · 6 min read

Building a dark/light theme toggle in Astro

CSS custom properties, localStorage persistence, and no flash of wrong theme

How this blog's theme toggle works — a data-theme attribute on the root element, CSS custom properties for every colour, an icon-triggered dropdown for System/Light/Dark selection, and a synchronous inline script to prevent the flash of wrong theme on load.

1 Apr 2026, BST · 5 min read

Typed content collections in Astro

Zod schemas, build-time validation, and what the draft flag actually does

How this blog uses Astro content collections with a Zod schema to validate every piece of frontmatter at build time — including typed images, optional fields, and the draft flag pattern that keeps work-in-progress posts off the live site.

31 Mar 2026, BST · 3 min read

Keeping your zsh config out of Copilot's terminals

How a single env var separates your shell from the agent's

GitHub Copilot agent terminals are non-interactive and don't need your Powerlevel10k prompt or aliases — but a naive guard breaks your regular VS Code terminal too. Here's the fix: a custom env var that only VS Code injects into user-opened terminals.

30 Mar 2026, BST · 10 min read

Choosing the tech stack

Every tool was chosen deliberately — here's the reasoning

The full reasoning behind the tech stack for this blog: Astro for static output and content collections, Bulma for a no-runtime CSS foundation, Netlify for deployment and serverless functions, and TypeScript throughout.

30 Mar 2026, BST · 6 min read

How this blog was built

A series on the technical and design decisions behind Sourcier

A new series documenting the technical and design decisions behind this blog — from choosing Astro and setting up typed content collections, to building dark mode, a comment system, a mailing list, and everything in between.