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© 2025 Jamie Kuppens. CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Posts

I’ve written quite a lot over the years! I’ve written most of these blog posts for This Dot. View the full list of tags if you want to filter this list to a particular subject.

How to Add External Redirects to Your Astro Site on Vercel
January 4, 2025
astro

javascript

serverless

vercel
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.

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My Experience Migrating to Astro From Hugo
December 29, 2024
astro

hugo

javascript

mdx
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.

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The HTML Dialog Element: Enhancing Accessibility and Ease of Use
October 25, 2024
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html

web standards
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.

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Making Seamless Page Transitions with the View Transitions API
August 2, 2024
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web standards
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.

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CSS Hooks: A new way to style your React apps
February 28, 2024
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css

javascript

react
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.

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How to Implement Soft Delete with Prisma using Partial Indexes
February 2, 2024
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javascript

postgresql

prisma
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.

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QR Code Scanning & Generation
December 13, 2023
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angular

javascript
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.

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A Tale of Form Autofill, LitElement and the Shadow DOM
June 7, 2023
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lit

shadow dom

web components
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.

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A Guide to Custom Angular Attribute Directives
May 31, 2023
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angular
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.

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How to Add Continuous Benchmarking to Your Projects Using GitHub Actions
April 24, 2023
affiliate

benchmarking

github actions
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.

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Git Reflog: A Guide to Recovering Lost Commits
November 14, 2022
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git
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.

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Git Bisect: the Time Traveling Bug Finder
September 7, 2022
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git
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.

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A Guide to Keeping Secrets out of Git Repositories
May 30, 2022
affiliate

git

security
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.

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Debugging Strategies for Angular Applications
February 14, 2022
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angular

devtools

javascript
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.

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Connecting to PokeAPI with Angular and Apollo Client
November 9, 2021
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angular

graphql

javascript

typescript
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.

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Introduction to Testing in Node.js with Mocha and Chai
April 21, 2021
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chai

javascript

mocha

node

testing
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.

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Connecting to PostgreSQL using TypeORM
April 6, 2021
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javascript

node

postgresql
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.

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Connecting to PostgreSQL with Node.js
February 16, 2021
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javascript

node

postgresql
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.

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Writing Concurrent JavaScript with Async and Await
December 22, 2020
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javascript
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.

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Let's Build a Web App with NPM and Express
December 21, 2020
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express

javascript

node

npm
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!

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An Introduction to Node.js
December 9, 2020
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javascript

node
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.

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Performance: Optimizing Images on Gatsby Sites
August 4, 2020
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gatsby

javascript

web performance
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.

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WebGL Morph Targets and Ginger: Modernizing for Today's Web
July 17, 2020
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html

javascript

pwa
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.

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The Anatomy of an Interactive Discord Bot
May 27, 2019
development

discord

python
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.

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WTF is a Scene Graph?
September 17, 2017
c++

development

graphics
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.

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App Engine Flexible Explained
November 18, 2016
app engine

cloud

development
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.

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Building Multi-Tenant Applications on App Engine
October 13, 2016
app engine

cloud

development

python
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.

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Writing a CHIP-8 Virtual Machine in Rust
May 11, 2016
development

emulation

rust
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.

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Dependency Management in Go 1.6 is No Longer Painful
February 6, 2016
development

golang

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

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