Posts

February 25, 2025

Vercel previews offer a great way to test PRs for a project. They have a predefined environment and don’t require any additional setup work from the reviewer to test changes quickly. Many projects also use end-to-end tests with Playwright as part of the review process to ensure that no regressions slip uncaught.

Read More

February 4, 2025

Laravel is a mature, robust, and powerful web framework that makes developing PHP applications a breeze. In particular, I want to demonstrate how to create a website that can be used to convert videos online using queue jobs for processing and temporary URLs for downloading the converted files.

Read More

January 4, 2025

Astro supports redirects out of the box when using an adapter, but only redirects to pages on the same site that Astro knows to exist. Although the Cloudflare adapter does support external redirects, supporting them is considered a "non-goal" according to the Astro roadmap. There does seem to be interest in adding external redirects to the Vercel adapter as well, but as of now this doesn't work.

Read More

December 29, 2024

Back in February of 2016 I created this website using Hugo. I chose Hugo primarily because of its fast builds, but also because it was easy to use and author content with as it supported markdown. However, I've recently switched my website over to Astro and I'm going to talk about my experience with it and why I made the switch.

Read More

October 25, 2024

Dialogs are a common component added to applications, whether on the web or in native applications. Traditionally there has not been a standard way of implementing these on the web, resulting in many ad-hoc implementations that don’t act consistently across different web applications. Often, commonly expected features are missing from dialogs due to the complexity of implementing them.

Read More

August 2, 2024

Traditionally web applications have always had a less polished experience, both functionally and visually speaking, compared to native applications on mobile and other platforms. This has been improving over the years with the introduction of new web APIs and standards. One such new API that bridges that gap is the View Transitions API.

Read More

February 28, 2024

With the rise of CSS in JS libraries like Material UI and Chakra, developers have started creating dynamic and reusable styles using JavaScript; however, the performance implications of these libraries have led to the exploration of alternative solutions. One such solution is CSS Hooks, a library that offers a different approach to managing styles in web applications.

Read More

February 2, 2024

Most APIs and applications that allow you to manage content have some form of deletion functionality. Sometimes you may want to make something recoverable after it’s been deleted, or perform the actual deletion later, and soft deletion is a way to accomplish this.

Read More

December 13, 2023

QR codes provide a very valuable way of sharing information with users, and many applications rely on them for various purposes. Common examples of places where QR codes can be useful include but are not limited to theaters, social gatherings and other booking services. Integrating QR codes can seem intimidating, but thankfully they’re not too difficult to handle with Angular and the help of a couple of robust software libraries such as ZXing.

Read More

June 7, 2023

Many web applications utilize forms in places be it for logging in, making payments, or editing a user profile. As a user of web applications, you have probably noticed that the browser is able to autofill in certain fields when a form appears so that you don't have to do it yourself. If you've ever written an application in Lit though, you may have noticed that this doesn't always work as expected.

Read More

May 31, 2023

When working inside of Angular applications you may have noticed special attributes such as NgClass, NgStyle and NgModel. These are special attributes that you can add to elements and components that are known as attribute directives. In this article, I will cover how these attributes are created and show a couple of examples.

Read More

April 24, 2023

Over the lifetime of a project performance, issues may arise from time to time. Lots of the time, these issues don't get detected until they get into production. Adding continuous benchmarking to your project and build pipeline can help you catch these issues before that happens.

Read More

November 14, 2022

Losing data can be very frustrating. Sometimes data is lost because of hardware dying, but other times it’s done by mistake. Thankfully, Git has tools that can assist with the latter case at least. In this article, I will demonstrate how one can use the git-reflog tool to recover lost code and commits.

Read More

September 7, 2022

I think it’s safe to say that most of us have been in a situation where we pull down some changes from main and something breaks unexpectedly, or a bug got introduced in a recent deployment. It might not take long to narrow down which commit caused the issue if there’s only a couple of new commits, but if you’re a dozen or more commits behind, it can be a daunting task to determine which one caused it.

Read More

May 30, 2022

If you’ve been a developer for a while, then you hopefully know it is wise to keep secret information such as passwords and encryption keys outside of source control. If you didn’t know that, then surprise! Now you know. Sometimes slip-ups do happen and a password ends up in a default config file or a new config file was not added to “.gitignore” and that same someone ran “git add .” and didn’t even notice it got committed. There should be protections in place no matter how diligent your programmers are since nobody is infallible, and the peace of mind is well worth it.

Read More

February 14, 2022

When programming, a lot of time is spent reading and debugging code. When coming to grips with a new framework or library, it is important to know how to debug it when things eventually go astray. Angular has a plethora of useful 1st party and 3rd party tools that will aid you in debugging your application effectively.

Read More

November 9, 2021

GraphQL is becoming more relevant each passing day, and becoming necessary to connect to many APIs on the web. In this post, I'll show you how to connect to a publically available GraphQL API with Angular and Apollo Client. You will need basic knowledge of JavaScript to follow along, and although some basic Angular knowledge is useful, it is not entirely necessary, and I'll explain enough so that anyone can follow along.

Read More

April 21, 2021

When writing software, it can be tedious to test features manually and ensure your entire program continues to work as it evolves over time. We can use automated testing to invoke our program automatically, and ensure it works as expected.

Read More

April 6, 2021

In my previous article we learned how to connect to a PostgreSQL database using the node-postgres package pg. This works fine, and will be perfect for many applications, but one may also choose to opt for using an ORM instead.

Read More

February 16, 2021

If you plan on writing more advanced applications in Node.js, you may find the need to store information persistently. Depending on the needs of the application, you may opt for storing data in a relational database like Postgres. In this article, I'm going to cover how you can use Node.js to connect to and execute queries against a Postgres database.

Read More

December 22, 2020

When working with Node.js you'll encounter code that is run synchronously and asynchronously. When things run synchronously, tasks are completed one at a time. All other tasks must be completed before another one can be started. As discussed in our first Node.js post, Node.js uses an event loop to manage asynchronous operations.

Read More

December 21, 2020

To continue where our last article left off, we'll be showing you how to use npm to download and use libraries in your Node.js applications. Open source libraries will help you write less code and be more productive. The npm ecosystem is diverse and has many thousands of useful libraries that you can use absolutely free of charge!

Read More

December 9, 2020

Node.js is an open source project that allow you to run JavaScript outside of the browser. As a consequence, Node has become very prevalent, and is a popular choice for backend projects.

Read More

August 4, 2020

Our Labs website is written using Gatsby, and uses images in many places. We have images that are both statically hosted, and images that are hosted in Contentful. However, we found that many of our static images weren't compressed as optimally as they could be and were inflating page sizes.

Read More

July 17, 2020

Ginger is a morph target demo that was initially written in 2011 for chrome experiments, and then rewritten to work as progressive web app in early 2016. In essence, Ginger is a customizable head that uses a slider to tweak various facial features, much like a character customization system one would find in a video game. It also supports taking screenshots, and generating share links that can be used to share your creation with others.

Read More

May 27, 2019

I've messed with Discord bots in servers quite a bit and I've always had fun with the various game bots that I've encountered. I've played with complex bots that play Cards Against Humanity, and relatively simple bots like one that emulates an 8 ball. All the 8 ball did was respond with 'Yes' or 'No' at random, and even a bot that simple is very fun when played with friends. I wanted to get into the Discord bot creation game to see how these things tick.

Read More

September 17, 2017

Not too long ago I started to dabble in low-level graphics programming again. I set a goal of creating a basic scene that can be defined in a similar way to production-grade game engines like Unity and friends. I felt comfortable with basic OpenGL at the time, however the guides that I followed never told me how to create a hierarchical scene.

Read More

November 18, 2016

App Engine is a service by Google that provides hosting for web applications. Depending on how much traffic your application receives, App Engine will dynamically allocate resources to your infrastructure. App Engine has historically been somewhat limited in functionality when it comes to language support and control over your infrastructure; however this has changed with the advent of App Engine Flexible Environment which is more resemblant to services like Elastic Beanstalk.

Read More

October 13, 2016

With the rise of cloud computing and the proliferation of new users to the web, it has become a necessity for successful web applications to be able to serve thousands of users whilst being reliable, fast, and secure. People depend on web services for their day-to-day lives much more than they did during the internet's infancy, and it's expected that applications meet user expectations in order to stay relevant.

Read More

May 11, 2016

A few months ago after a tiring day at work, I came across a post on /r/programming about livecoding a N64 emulator in rust and instantly became hooked. That stream piqued my interest in the subject of emulation, along with giving me that wonderful feeling I had when I first got into programming. After reading some discussion in the stream comments, I decided the best way to get introduced into the emulation scene was to write a CHIP-8 virtual machine.

Read More

February 6, 2016

Traditionally, Go has handled dependencies by installing them all in the same directory; but with Go 1.6, vendoring is now offical.

Read More