December 16, 2015

Leave Code Better than You Found It

I am grateful for my experience in the Boy Scouts and thankful I was able to make it all the way to Eagle Scout. While everything wasn’t perfect (like anything else), I learned invaluable lessons about leadership, teamwork, respect for nature, and survival skills. One of the recurrent themes involved in our outings, gatherings, and organization was “leave things better than you find them.” It applied to the wilderness, where we would try to leave any camping areas we used (or created) cleaner than we found them to minimize our footprint and environmental impact.
December 16, 2015

Dockerizing a Node.js Web Application

Several months ago, I wrote about how you might go about ‘dockerizing’ a node.js web application. I was able to write an expanded version of this post for Semaphore CI’s Community site. I am re-posting it here — enjoy! Dockerizing a Node.js Web Application Introduction If you’ve ever developed anything that needs to ‘live’ somewhere besides your local machine, you know that getting an application up and running on a different machine is no simple task.
November 17, 2015

React Native: Quick Start and Including Images

Origin Story I asked a question on Stack Overflow about ~7 months back (at time of writing) about requiring and including images in react native. I figured it was a simple misunderstanding on my part about the directory structure(s) used in iOS development, but it turned out to be both 1) something other people were curious about and 2) an area where the react native team was still stabilizing the API.
November 15, 2015

How To Check If A File or Directory Exists in Ruby

Even though JavaScript (and node.js!) is/are my first programming language love(s)1, I’ve been trying to hone my skills in Ruby and Python to better merit the whole ‘full-stack’ title thing. Also because there are some really great things that python and ruby are great for that JavaScript isn’t (vice-versa for each language, really). So, I’ll occasionally be sharing some small tips/tricks I pick up along the way in these other realms.
November 8, 2015

Questions I ask in interviews

Interviewing as a developer nowadays is at the same time pretty exciting — technology is playing a crucial and exciting role in our cultures and societies — and harrowing — tech companies are engaged in what I’ve often heard described as a “talent arms race.” As a result, there are quite a few posts, talks, books, &c. about how to crack/solve/pass the coding interview. This post isn’t about the whiteboard or problem-solving end of things, where the company is evaluating you, but rather about the part where you get to evaluate the company.
November 2, 2015

New NPM Module: Favorites

I don’t know about you, but there are a few modules that I tend to use really often in the projects I’m working on. I usually go with some combination of eslint, lodash, babel, and a number of others. I’ve written briefly about some of my favorites here and here. I also find myself trying to stay current with the latest version of node for security considerations as well as all the other good that comes from using the current stable version.
October 23, 2015

Method Chaining in JavaScript

Are you still a JavaScript padawan learner? Then this post is for you. Maybe you’re still going over the basics of JavaScript, learning how to define functions, how objects work, and some of the other baby steps. And maybe you’ve toyed around with that semi-well known library for querying the DOM (and for doing wayyyy too many other things, IMO), le jQuery. If you have or if you’ve tried out another library, you’ve likely seen something like this:
October 20, 2015

Npm Modules I can't live without (pt. 2)

I’ve been writing a three-part series on some great modules I love and use. This is part two, but make sure to check out the first post. Eslint: If you’re not doing static analysis on your code, you’re carrying around a giant foot-gun…and probably using it, often. Eslint comes from the jsHint/jsLint school of thought, but with some notable differences: Espree for parsing, an AST for analysis, and it’s very pluggable.
October 20, 2015

Modules I Can't Live Without (pt. 1)

##jQuery!!!!!!! Jk you guys. I wanted to do a post that just briefly goes through some npm modules I find really useful for a variety of reasons. For something more intense, you can check out one of the ‘awesome’ lists here or here. It’s Listicle Time Lodash: You could say Lodash is pretty dependable. Well, maybe it’s better to say that it’s really depended on. It’s a fantastic, performant toolbox of tools for functional programming and just a ton of common use-cases.
October 18, 2015

New Look

Trying out a new look for the blog. When I first started writing here, I was pretty swamped with other things, so I had just forked and modified an existing Ghost theme to suit my needs. It was clean and I was happy with for the most part. I still don’t have enough time to dedicate to making the design incredible, but the old look was bothering me. It felt way too cookie-cutter.