MonkeyLoader No-nonsense tools and tutorials for UK developers

MonkeyLoader

No-nonsense tools and tutorials for UK developers

Latest Articles

A Script Shelf, Not a Script Free-for-All: Managed Helpers for UK Support Desks
Infrastructure

A Script Shelf, Not a Script Free-for-All: Managed Helpers for UK Support Desks

Support teams do not need a browser full of random userscripts. They need a small, managed shelf of approved helpers that can be switched on, pinned and rolled back without waiting for a full app release. Here is how to build one with a signed manifest and CSP-friendly injection.
Queue Fairly or Fold: Backpressure Lessons from a UK Ticket Drop
Performance

Queue Fairly or Fold: Backpressure Lessons from a UK Ticket Drop

Ticket-site loaders usually collapse at 9am because they are built to look optimistic rather than be honest. This opinionated piece uses a festival-ticket drop to show how queueing, rate limits and graceful degradation can shed load fairly instead of pretending everyone is about to get in.
When the Registry Blinks: A Fallback Loader for UK Builds
Infrastructure

When the Registry Blinks: A Fallback Loader for UK Builds

A registry wobble should not turn a two-person UK team into an incident response unit. This is a practical runbook for lockfile discipline, vendored tarballs, a local mirror and a tiny fallback loader that keeps CI shipping without a platform rewrite.
Only Load the Rules That Apply: A Postcode-Driven Config Loader for UK Services
Performance

Only Load the Rules That Apply: A Postcode-Driven Config Loader for UK Services

Deposit schemes, council tax rules, recycling calendars and opening hours all change at the border. This walkthrough builds a small loader that resolves a postcode area, pulls only the relevant config bundle, caches it hard at the edge and degrades sensibly when the lookup is down.
Edge Cases: Serving IE Mode a Legacy Bundle Without Punishing Everyone Else
Infrastructure

Edge Cases: Serving IE Mode a Legacy Bundle Without Punishing Everyone Else

IE mode lives on in UK councils, NHS trusts and housing associations, and most build pipelines either ignore it or make every visitor pay for it. Here is a small, instrumented loader that keeps modern browsers on the fast path and gives you the numbers to retire the fallback with evidence.
The Wrapper, the Pin and the Kill Switch: Extending Vendor Loaders You Cannot Fork
Infrastructure

The Wrapper, the Pin and the Kill Switch: Extending Vendor Loaders You Cannot Fork

You cannot change the vendor's loader, but you can stop it from owning your page. A practical, slightly opinionated guide to proxy loaders, feature detection, version pinning and kill switches, with a UK procurement brain on the side.
Peak Season With Two Pairs of Hands: A Loader Checklist for Small UK Retail Teams
Performance

Peak Season With Two Pairs of Hands: A Loader Checklist for Small UK Retail Teams

Black Friday does not need a war room, but it does need a plan that survives a tired developer at 7am. This is the pre-flight checklist for a two-person UK retail team: cut the critical path, park the widgets, and rehearse the rollback before the traffic arrives.
The Long Weekend Release Drill: Ship on Friday, Sleep on Monday
Infrastructure

The Long Weekend Release Drill: Ship on Friday, Sleep on Monday

A bank holiday weekend is a load test with a skeleton crew. Here is how to warm caches, rehearse traffic, freeze deployments and build a rollback plan that makes Monday morning dull rather than dramatic.
Cron, Clocks and the Missing Hour: Scheduling Loaders for Europe/London
Performance

Cron, Clocks and the Missing Hour: Scheduling Loaders for Europe/London

Daylight-saving transitions break naive cron jobs twice a year. Here is how to resolve UK wall-clock schedules safely, test the awkward Sundays, and keep background loaders predictable in both BST and GMT.
The Two-Second Illusion: Making Council Pages Feel Quick on a Wobbly Connection
Performance

The Two-Second Illusion: Making Council Pages Feel Quick on a Wobbly Connection

A rotating circle tells a resident that something is happening. It doesn't tell them what, how long, or whether to keep waiting. Here's a practical playbook for perceived performance on UK public-sector sites — skeleton screens, honest progress, accessible status messages and cheap tests a two-person team can actually run.
Forty Lines and a Promise: Swapping a Tag Manager for a Consent-Aware Script Loader
Infrastructure

Forty Lines and a Promise: Swapping a Tag Manager for a Consent-Aware Script Loader

Tag managers are convenient right up until you open the network tab. Here's the small, boring replacement we built for a UK marketing site: a sub-2 KB loader that handles ordering, consent gating and failure isolation — plus the performance budget that proved the swap was worth it.
Your Bundle Is Too Big: Splitting a UK SaaS Front-End by Route Without a Framework Rewrite
Performance

Your Bundle Is Too Big: Splitting a UK SaaS Front-End by Route Without a Framework Rewrite

You do not need to adopt a new meta-framework to get faster first loads. Here is the route-level splitting playbook we used on a small Bristol-built SaaS, including the loading states, the stale-chunk problem nobody warns you about, and the numbers we saw on Core Web Vitals afterwards.
Roll Your Own Feature Flags: A Two-Person Team's Case for Ditching the Flag SaaS
Infrastructure

Roll Your Own Feature Flags: A Two-Person Team's Case for Ditching the Flag SaaS

Per-seat flag platforms are lovely until the invoice arrives and you notice you are shipping user identifiers to a US processor to decide whether a button is blue. A practical, slightly opinionated look at building a small self-hosted flag service with proper kill switches and UK GDPR-friendly defaults.