The inane mutterings of Alexander Foxleigh
Hi. I'm Alex, I'm a lead frontend engineer and design systems specialist with a passion for building performant, accessible and highly usable web applications.
You can find out more about me by reading my blog, taking a look at my website or having a look at my social links which are below in the footer.
Here is an assorted collection of my rants, ravings and general ramblings. I apologise in advance.
After 12 years of contracting, I’ve decided it’s time to go permanent. This isn’t about the state of the market or personal burnout; it’s that my career has changed. I’ve gone from hands-on delivery to shaping systems, mentoring teams, and driving long-term strategy. That kind of work needs continuity, and contracting just doesn’t make as much sense for it anymore.
This week I published my first proper YouTube video. It’s not perfect – in fact, it’s a bit crap – but I loved making it. The project itself was a smart home hack to track traffic outside my house using Frigate, Node-RED, InfluxDB and Grafana, but the real surprise was how much fun I had with the whole video-making process. Editing was messy, my Mac fought me every step of the way, and yet I walked away buzzing. I think I might actually be a YouTuber now.
I built a game prototype in Godot by letting AI write all the code. It felt fast and magical, but the result was bloated, fragile, and impossible to learn from. Vibe coding looks like progress in the moment but if you don't already know how to write the code, it’s a dangerous trap.
I’ve wanted to make a game since I was a kid copying code out of a VIC-20 book — and now, decades later, I finally am. I’ve got no idea what I’m doing, I’m vibe-coding the whole thing, and somehow it’s both chaos and magic. I'm having SO much fun!
There are few things more motivating than genuinely loving the team you work with. If you don’t enjoy your colleagues, you’ll burn out faster, be less productive, and find much less satisfaction in your work. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Here’s how to help build the greatest dev team you’ve ever been on.
If you’ve ever had your AI pair-programmer produce code that looks nothing like what you had in mind, then you may be skipping a step with the AI that - before the AI revolution - you did all the time without realising it. Planning!
There was a time when writing beautiful code was the goal, where naming was poetry and indentation was sacred. But let’s be honest: it wasn’t about performance or outcomes. It was about making life easier for (and impressing) other developers. That era is fading fast, replaced by a world where results matter more than elegance and code isn’t written for humans anymore.
If you’ve ever copied something out of ChatGPT and pasted it into LinkedIn, Notion, or your CMS, I make a quick little tool to help you out.