misc

Since I spontaneously decided to teach myself frontend development, I thought I would start by making myself familiar with common tools used in frontend development. Up until now I have been tangentially aware of what it takes to create a frontend, but I have never taken the time to read up on any specific topic. I will divide the tools into four categories: development tools, build tools, deployment tools, and, of course, other tools. [Read More]

Warning: This is somewhat of a rant. Off to a great start This week I have been toying around with the idea of doing something that would involve some processing on the frontend that goes beyond submitting a form to the backend. After some googling, I decided to try out my idea and set up a vue.js project. The easiest way to get started seemed to be to use my preferred IDE and set up a starter vue. [Read More]

Many tools automatically look for a special file called .env, which contains KEY=VALUE pairs, one per line. I am here referring to a file with the same syntax, but with arbitrary names. I use different names to distinguish between configurations for different development stages. Using environment variables for configuration is pretty much accepted as good practice today for web applications. But it’s always a hassle to deal with them during development, if you are not using a specialised service for them. [Read More]

While every developer today probably has a working knowledge of common git-commands for everyday life, there are some more obscure commands that fewer people know about and even fewer people use. One of these is git bisect. If you ever had a broken build and a large number of commits that had been pushed since the last known good build, then you will very much appreciate, what git bisect can do. [Read More]

git is the de-facto standard for version control these days. As a software developer, you will be comfortable using common git-commands, like init, add, commit etc. However, there are some quite exotic git-commands out there. One of my favorite – that surprisingly few people seem to know about – is git bisect, which can be incredibly useful if you need to identify which commit introduced a breaking change. Especially, if there are a large number of commits that you need to go through. [Read More]

While working on MembershipNerd I was looking for a very simple service that would let me write automated, end-to-end tests for sending emails. In particular, I wanted to create an automated test for the sign-up process. By “end-to-end test” I mean that I actually want to send an email, with a real SMTP server, verify that the email has been received by the recipient and contains the correct information. If I simply wanted to verify that the sign-up triggers an email, then I could use the built-in email service of Django’s testing framework. [Read More]

Today I spent most of the day researching small cloud providers and “self-hosted PaaS” technology. This was triggered by a question that had been on my mind for a while: What is the minimum “cost-per-application” for production-quality containerized hosting? What do I mean by that? cost-per-application: How much does it cost to host one application, two applications, etc.? Ideally, I would like to find the minimum price that will scale linearly. [Read More]

If you use JSON Linked Data (JSON-LD) to add Google-friendly structured data to your website, you might have come across the following error in your Google Search Console: Unparsable structured data Structured data with syntax errors detected Bad escape sequence in string Looking at the search console’s help page for that error reveals the following information: Error type Description Bad escape sequence in string An invalid escape sequence used in a string value. [Read More]

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Disclaimer: I am also not a JavaScript developer. So don’t take this as JavaScript programming advice. :) I like to know how many people visit my website, and what articles they are reading. Why? Because I find it can be quite motivating to see these numbers go up. Because I am located in Germany, I need to provide a way for my site visitors to explicitly give their consent. [Read More]