Ali Smith

@fortythieves
111 Followers
332 Following
505 Posts
Staff Product Engineer at Natcap. Volunteer at CodeYourFuture. Occasional open science nerd. Prev: Overleaf
Webhttps://alasdairsmith.co.uk
PronounsHe/him
GitHubhttps://github.com/40thieves
I’ve been working on rebuilding and redesigning my personal site for a bit and wrote some words about it: https://alasdairsmith.co.uk/journal/site-redesign-spring-2026
Site Redesign Spring 2026 | Alasdair Smith

Alasdair Smith is a frontend-focused engineer and leader based in London.

Amazing work from my Green Web Foundation colleagues.

⚡ State of the Fossil-Free Internet ⚡

The report casts light on the opaqueness of climate disclosures made by the internet's largest players, while highlighting three pathways for an internet that serves everyone.

https://fossilfree.greenweb.org/2026/

State of the Fossil-Free Internet Report

In this first annual briefing by Green Web Foundation, we examine the biggest obstacles to a fossil-free internet. This year’s focus: the rise of too many dirty data centres.

State of the Fossil-Free Internet Report

I'm hiring for a few roles! See https://codeyourfuture.io/jobs/ for details. Hiring for:

* People to help teach software engineering in London and Manchester
* A technical interview coach (UK remote)
* Community builders in London and Manchester

Part-time, helping great people, doing good in the world.

Jobs | CodeYourFuture

Job openings at CYF: be part of a unique learning community for people with the most limited economic, social and personal resources.

CodeYourFuture
My role at Plotly was part of a recent reduction in force, so I'm looking for something new. I would ideally like to work in education, developer experience, open source, or scientific computing, and I'm open to part-time, full-time, or contracting positions, either in Toronto or remote. There's more about me at https://third-bit.com/about/ - if you'd like to chat, please give me a shout.
The Third Bit: About Me

Okay, this is quite a banger feature for web perf engineers. In Chrome Canary, you can now turn on an experimental feature to throttle single requests or requests to a single domain!

chrome://flags/#devtools-individual-request-throttling

This feature is golden to figure out if a delayed or heavy resource has a noticeable performance impact. 👏

Our friends from Debugbear share some details:

https://www.debugbear.com/blog/chrome-devtools-throttle-individual-request

Ever wondered why otel is so painful on the frontend and how we could make things better?

Wonder no more! I had a lot of fun writing this article and venting a bit, but it wouldn’t be an article of mine if I didn’t share how the community is stepping up and how we can be a part of the change ❤️

https://thenewstack.io/setting-up-opentelemetry-on-the-frontend-because-i-hate-myself/

Setting Up OpenTelemetry on the Frontend Because I Hate Myself

Frontend developers deserve so much better from OpenTelemetry, especially since they stand to benefit so much.

The New Stack

Reflecting on an incredible experience speaking at @TheLeadDev's #LDX3 conference last week! Very grateful to have been accepted as a speaker and for the amazing support throughout.

I enjoyed discussing challenges growing teams in the era of layoffs, and hopeful that my talk can provide some inspiration by treating teaching as a core engineering skill, applying lessons from pedagogy. Slides here 👉🏻 https://speakerdeck.com/alismith/creating-the-next-generation-of-senior-engineers

#LeadDev #EngineeringLeadership

I really want to be able to switch to Vivaldi, but it's just wiped all of my tabs twice in a row.

I just wanted to switch between 2 different profiles, which seems like is the whole point of the feature?

Any recommendations? I was converted to vertical tabs by Arc. I know there's Zen but last I heard they didn't support DRM so netflix and friends didn't work.

This is scary! I’ve been in Blatten (about 15 years ago), it’s an incredibly beautiful part of the world https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/28/swiss-glacier-collapse-village-switzerland-blatten
Swiss village almost entirely destroyed after collapse of glacier buries it in mud

One person missing and Blatten devastated after huge cloud of ice and rubble inundates evacuated town

The Guardian
So my work’s security vendor just killed Raycast (unclear if it’s a false positive or not). How do I use a computer again?