Developer Featured

Goodbye, Cute Robot

I recently did some digital decluttering and while I was meant to downsize my digital footprint, I ended up expanding it instead. Typical of me. Just like when I got rid of my own clutter at the car boot sale only to bring some new stuff back from it...

dev log

Astro + React + Vitest: The Config That Actually Works (After AI Failed Me)

When asked to setup Astro tests with Vitest, LLMs left me with unsolved errors and an attempt to quietly delete the test file and move on (nice try AI!). The actual solution was simple, but did require piecing a few things together.

Bolt Hackathon

Bolt Hackathon - Week 4

A last-minute custom worksheets feature addition! Dramatic video making! Hackathon submission drama! And some thoughts after dragging my feet on this post for 2 weeks.

Bolt Hackathon

Bolt Hackathon - Week 3

Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4 TLDR; This week I worked on the custom lined paper generator and worksheet list. The CSS for the template creator tool really stumped the AIs. Then I played some more with worksheet and blog list designs. What Shall We Do With Worksheets

Bolt Hackathon

Bolt Hackathon - Week 2

I ended up getting distracted by a One-Shot Prompt Challenge Side quest (separate post coming). After getting that (mostly) out of the way I turned to tackling the layout and design issues this week.

Bolt Hackathon

Bolt Hackathon - First Week Progress

I'm taking part in the Bolt.new hackathon. First week playing with Bolt has been a fun. Hopefully the practical nature of the project I picked for this will help keep me away from procrastinating over perfecting the code.

TIL: You Can See the Path in Finder

One of many annoyances on a Mac for me has been navigating around folders quickly. Especially going up the folder tree - I was used to just clicking on the folder name and getting the full path. Not so much in Finder :( Turns out while clicking on the folder name

Developer

Time For Change

It’s been six weeks to the day since the Automattic layoffs, so it seems fitting to finally gather my thoughts about it. I haven’t blogged publicly for quite a while, not counting the odd code snippet post. But in the last few months I’ve been itching more

dev log

Typescript vs English

I kept struggling to remember what the type predicate was in Typescript... turns out I just didn't really know what a 'predicate' is in the first place... shakes fist darn you grammar!

crafts

Create an Origami Penguin in 6 Steps

Last Saturday I went to London to see the Tokyo Day exhibition. One of the several available attractions was origami, and considering it was one of the few things you did not need to sign up in advance for I decided to have a go at it. I must say

Developer

Cross Subdomain Authentication with FeathersJS Client

FeathersJS v4 switched from storing the jwt token in a cookie to localStorage. This was fine when the app stayed on one domain, but when splitting things out into several apps on different subdomains I realised unlike cookies localStorage does not play nicely. I found the Customization option in the

code

Create React App Fix for Webpack Symlinks Without Ejecting

When restructuring my project and moving it to use Create React App I've ended up with an odd error for my shared jsx components (I've split the project into two separate apps but some of the styling and UI components will be the same so didn&

Developer

FeathersJS Sequelize Soft Delete

It might have been the late hour but spent over 1.5h chasing this the other day... and getting tangled up in config and softdelete2 feathers-plus hooks. Turns out to setup soft deletes in FeathersJS using feathers-sequelize you only need the Sequelize built in paranoid option. Here's the

fix

SSH Broken Pipe When Running in VMWare Workstation

Another note to self post... since this bit me more than once. ssh USER@SERVER ... packet_write_wait: Connection to IP_ADDRESS port 22: Broken pipe Most of the answers point to the ServerAliveInterval or ClientAliveInterval but if you are running the command from inside VMWare Workstation (broken for me

Developer

Git Gui Startup Error on Fedora

Recently started getting the following error when trying to run git gui. Googling the issue didn't seem to help much. Error in startup script: bad pad value "2m": must be positive screen distance while executing "grid $w.bitmap $w.msg -in $w.top -sticky news

code

Example of Sequelize Associations in FeathersJS

I've been playing around with FeathersJS and one thing that has been hard to find is a concrete example of setting up Sequelize with related tables. Here's an example of the users table referencing a user_statuses table using the new model.associate() syntax including populating

code

Jest + Enzyme simulate form events

Since I've started doing Jest+Enzyme testing I've run into a few issues. One of those was dealing with state change related tests when you don't have access to the actual React component state. Mainly because of the need to wrap the tested component

wordpress

Easy Way to Migrate Wordpress Sites Between Servers

As part of cleanup and cost-cutting I had to recently moved my WordPress installations from one server to another. To make matters a bit more complicated the new server was not a cPanel based one. So, I had to move my WordPress instances, but not really the user accounts that

movies

Assassin's Creed Movie

I should probably start by admitting that I haven't played the game itself. But like must gamers (unless they've been living under a rock) I had an idea about what Assassin's Creed is about. I knew about the praise it got and about the

Developer

How to Remember Tar Parameters

I've got the extraction options for tgz files pretty well ingrained in my brain, but whenever I had to create an archive I always had to go back to the manual. Not any more! Annoyed at my terrible memory I created a little mnemonic for myself. Here'

work

Never Say Never

Sometimes you have to take one step back to take two forward. Or in other words, never say never. Or to put it in simple terms – I’ve gone perm again… I’ve been pretty happy with the contracting work I’ve done over the last year and a bit.

Killednloading MeteorJS Issue

When deploying my meteor app to a new server I ran into a weird issue that didn’t seem to come back with any helpful errors. Running: `` meteor would get stuck on Download meteor-tool@3.0.38 which would eventually exit with a “killednloading” message. For anyone else stuck scratching

music

How We Listen to the Music We Love

This wasn’t what I planned on writing about today… But since I’ve updated my gaming machine the other day (Goodbye Vista!  – yeah, I was surprised too, to see it was still running that…) I’ve been doing a little bit of clean up on it. The usual, tune

fix

SailsJS 0.9.8 and Bootstrap 3.0.3 LESS

While trying to setup a starter project I hit a bit of a snag. Turns out the latest less files don’t want to play nice with the grunt-contrib-less (0.5.2) that comes with SailsJS (0.9.8). parse error: failed at &:extend(.clearfix all); Since the required

goals

NaNoWriMo Time

It’s that time of the year again. Beginning of November, the time when most writers, especially the aspiring kind, get excited and plunge deep into writing. It’s like the writer’s New Year. Time to wipe the slate clean, and make some “resolution”. I have to say that