Say you have a batch file and you want to read in a template and replace some values in it and output the result as a separate file.
| Home | Blogging |
Fun Links 2016-02-12
There are many things about which developers can get quite passionate and even defensive. We are a strongly opinionated lot. There are some classic examples: brace style, emacs vs. vi, any language vs. any other language. It boils down to personal preference in the end.
Another area where personal preference and passion can come into play is with coding fonts. I love typography, and the inherent challenges of creating (or finding) the perfect coding typeface is exciting.
Fun Links 2016-01-29
Since tomorrow is my son’s third birthday, I’d say it is high time he starts to learn to program. I need him (l)earning ASAP. A common goal for any geeky parent, but how do you go about it?
Below are some educational tools and resources aimed at teaching programming whether to someone very young or anyone in general. And even if you know how to program already, the learning never stops.
Fun Links 2016-01-22
You may have heard me mentioned Visual Studio Code before; it is an editor from Microsoft which is more lightweight and web focused. I’ve been using the December release for the past month or so, and I must say it is certainly coming into its own. It works well with JavaScript and Typescript and other web-based languages, providing an Intellisense that feels more comprehensive than its peers’.
The nice thing about Visual Studio Code (at least for me) is that it is cross-platform.
Fun Links 2016-01-15
Some web application front-ends are just visualizations of data stored and calculated on servers somewhere. They provide the interaction mechanism to interact with this data, but they are agnostic to the “domain” of the problems they are solving.
However, more and more, the browser-based applications are becoming central to the full application experience. When you consider static applications without back-end servers, most of the domain logic sits in the JavaScript.
Fun Links 2016-01-08
Having integrated third party identity management into a web app recently, I thought I’d take a moment to compare some of the options available in this space.
Whatever type of app you are building, you are very likely to have users. Often you need to keep track of those users, and authenticate them when using your app. And not just authenticate, you need to collect some information about them and provide a way for them to change their passwords, or even reset them if forgotten.
Using JSON Web Tokens with Hook.io
Continuing from my article about React and Redux, which are very much front-end concerns, I now turn my focus onto the back-end. Since my karaoke song request app is a static one, hosted at the moment, on GitHub Pages, I don’t have a backend. Instead, I take advantage of third-party services for persistence and authentication.
There are many hosted database providers out there, and even a few backend-as-a-service offerings as well.
Getting Started with React+Redux
Over the holidays, I worked on a web app. That isn’t new; I do that most chances I get. However this app was an assignment, and I’d like to walk you through some of the lessons learned. I’m planning this to be a series of articles looking at different aspects of building this application.
The assignment, in this case, was one that I created myself. I created it for some of my colleagues as a way to learn new web technologies without needing to worry about what to build.
Fun Links 2015-12-18
Continuing with my trend of grouping links by theme, I’m going to list a few Dropbox based blogging/web hosting solutions. It is an appealing proposition, particularly for people who are non-technical to be able to update files on your computer and then have them magically published for you.
I’m listing services with free options, but I’ll give honourable mention to a couple of others which may not. In general, some of these tools feel a bit simplified, but that makes sense since they are trying to be as easy to use as possible.
Fun Links 2015-12-11
One important aspect of software development, particularly agile software development is continuous integration. Often referred to as just CI, continuous integration is the practice of ensuring that your piece of software builds and passes any tests you have set up for it on a regular basis, usually just after someone makes changes to the source code. Typically this integration happens in an automated fashion.
I won’t go into all of the details of why this is good, but I will say this is done everywhere from large enterprise teams to small, indie open source projects.