I currently use an Apple Macbook Pro 2016 for my day to day. It's starting to push on a bit in tech years but for doing web dev it's still more than ok. I have Windows 10 running on it using bootcamp which for the most part has been rock solid.

Last week I ran into an issue where Windows would constantly reboot itself after a few minutes of use. Initially I thought the OS had gotten corrupt after it ran out of battery power while updating during the night. I foolishly forgot to plug in the power cable before going to bed and putting the machine to sleep rather than turned off.

I tried to use the Windows Repair tool to rollback to an image from last week which I knew was stable but this was failing to run in time before Windows would reboot.

Next, I decided to run a scandisk on the hard drive to see if that would solve my issue. Unfortunately it didn't cure anything so I started to think a full reinstall would have to be done.

Have you ever tried to view the style of html placeholder in the browser? By default in Chrome this option won't be available to you but if you press F12 to open the Developer Tools and then click on the 3 dots in the top right corner of the tool window you should see the Settings option.

Click on this option and you will be presented with a screen that should look similar to what's shown above.

Check the "Show user agent shadow DOM" checkbox and reload your page. You should now see the placeholder html output in your dev tools when you view the elements tab. Clicking on the placeholder html will bring up the applied styles for you to view or edit.

This weeks Friday Dev Tip is a quick one but very useful.

When using Visual Studio (2013 or greater), pressing and holding the Ctrl key when the Intellisense tooltip appears will make it go transparent so you can see any code underneath it.

No more pressing Esc and having to type again!

This tip is definitely filled under "Stuff I wish I'd known sooner".

In Chrome, when trying to locate where a specific style is located you can simply hold down Ctrl and left click on the style property.

This will jump to the exact location of the property you were looking at in the file that it was declared in on the Sources tab.

No more clicking on the file name next to the style property and then searching for it manually!

Feb 2019

Web
Developer
Monthly

Welcome to another Web Developer Monthly. This month's edition focuses a little more on some of the cool code samples and CodePens out there to help get your creative juices flowing.

If you've spotted anything you'd like me to share for the next Web Developer Monthly let me know in the comments below or reach out to me on Twitter. Enjoy!

MS Teams has quickly grown in usage within organizations over the last 12-18months. It's easy to see why - it's simple to use and ties into an organization's existing security policies very easily.

The only snag some people have with it is that when a lot of chatter is happening on a group channel important messages could be getting lost.

There are usually 2 ways to work around this.