You may be familiar with OpenTable, a service built around restaurant bookings. One of their main features is an embeddable widget that restaurants can insert in their website to let patrons reserve a table. Here’s what it looks like in the wild:

Here’s a thought:

“Most software applications consist of the same basic functions in different configurations”.

Let’s play with that. Imagine a super-high-level language that could describe a software application tersely, but still capture the usefulness of the application.

✏️ Our app

Example 1
App: Twitter
  Allow user to: login
  Allow user to: send a tweet
  Allow user to: follow another user
  Allow user to: view a timeline of tweets(further examples here)

• Our app needs a name, we’ll use Twitter as an example.
  I’ve made other examples here too.
• login is pretty self explanatory and so common that we can assume it’s baked into the language. login becomes library.login indicating we will use provided library behaviour and not a custom implementation. …

It turns out there’s a lot to learn by examining the cadence and variety of your side-projects…

I recently defended my PhD and in the process of preparing for the defence, I discovered that an old backup hard-drive was damaged beyond repair. Thankfully I had a further backup, but it got me thinking:

There’s a lot of stuff here that I probably will never look at again, but it’s important to me that I recognise it’s existence.

I hope I never have to look back at the PHP I wrote when I was learning, but I spent months cobbling together SQL queries and designing objectively terrible pages, and that process is important, at least to me. …

This is a piece of code I wrote for a previous blog post about writing a Custom Mocha Reporter. I wanted to generate HTML output from a template, but I didn’t need much functionality or an extra dependency. Turns out, it’s not that difficult.

Programmatically generating or producing HTML is not rocket science. The typical approach is:

1. Build a HTML template close to what you want.
2. Identify the variable parts of the template you want to change.
3. Write your code to get the replacement parts.
4. Use a templating engine to load the HTML and replace the variables with the replacement parts. …

Warning: This article is basically tech arts-and-crafts.

I want to display a screen in the office showing the latest unit test results, like a notice board, so the whole team can see the test status —and we wont miss failing tests.

We use Mocha to run unit tests in Node (nodejs). Jenkins watches our git repo and runs tests when we push new code.

The final product (github, and npm package) is viewed in a browser, refreshed automatically and looks something like this:

Here’s a quick and easy tip that will speed up your docker builds for Python, Nodejs or any project that requires installing dependencies…

If you are installing dependencies, copy only your dependency list before installing (package.json in Node or requirements.txt in python with pip), then move your application code.

Python example:

If your Dockerfile looks something like this:

FROM python:3.6-alpine
COPY . /app
RUN pip install -r /requirements.txt
CMD [ "python", "/app/yourscript.py" ]

Change it to:

FROM python:3.6-alpine
COPY requirements.txt /
RUN pip install -r /requirements.txt
COPY . /app
CMD [ "python", "/app/yourscript.py" ]

Node example:

If your Dockerfile looks something like this:

FROM node:8
COPY . /app
RUN npm install --production
EXPOSE 3000
CMD ["node"…

Unlike a lot of the internet, I happen to enjoy writing Javascript. I’m also a fan of functional programming; from a practical point of view, and from an aesthetic point of view. In the art of code, functional is beautiful.

Unfortunately, like most JS developers, my love of functional code is at odds with the asynchronous nature of the language.

Here’s the challenge:

1. The web is inherently asynchronous. Waiting for network requests, user input or animations — they all need to happen without holding up the rest of our code.
   (Aside: Async is not unique to the web of course. …

This will be a quick post, but I have to share! After months and months of work, the first units of the Posture Laptop Stand are finally ready to be shipped!

It’s been a super long road, and I’m eternally grateful to everybody who has helped along the way, including all of the wonderful early-bird customers!

Posture is on sale over at tryposture.com