Disclaimer: This is my personal opinion, take it with a grain of salt. — I was recently thrown into a huge Javascript codebase and I found it extremely hard to navigate. One thing that struck me was that a lot of the same things were done in different ways. …

Run custom Docker images on Google’s Cloud Run infrastructure — Cloud Run is very similar to Google’s App Engine and Cloud Functions. The main difference is that with Cloud Run, you can create custom Docker images. This means you have way more control over how your application should be built and you can go crazy with complicated custom Docker builds…

Fixing Cypress flakiness — I recently had a Cypress test that was very flaky. Sometimes it would pass and sometimes it would fail. One day, after three failed deployment pipelines thanks to this test, I decided to improve it once and for all. The Cypress error I was getting didn’t tell me a lot…

Only use pointers when you really need them — What Is a Pointer? To cover the basics, let’s begin by examining what a pointer is. Let’s look at the following CoffeeMachine example. The CoffeeMachine struct keeps track of how many coffee beans there are in the coffee machine. To create a new coffee machine, I use the NewCoffeeMachine() function. Here, I create a…

Write undetectable web scrapers — Recently, I wanted to scrape plane ticket prices from a few webpages to find the cheapest flight available. Unfortunately, these websites had very good web scraping protection and I kept getting blocked. This led me to try and build an undetectable web scraper. …

A look at ECMAScript, Javascript interpreters, and transpilers. — The Javascript world can be a confusing world. People talk about ECMAScript, Javascript, ES5, and ES2015 (which is the same as ES6 by the way). In this article, I will explain the Javascript landscape. ECMAScript ECMAScript is a language specification, and Javascript implements this specification. Every few years ECMAScript releases a…

How I use interfaces to keep my Go applications modular — Suppose a client asks you to create a back-end application in Go. In this scenario the client has just one request: he wants to be able to store and query users. In this article, I’ll show how I would set up such a project. Repositories In Go, I usually create repositories…

A simple, instructional guide — If you’re working as a developer, you’ve probably had one of those days where you try to fix a bug and, in the process, end up making multiple commits — usually with messages such as “fix”, “fix for real”, and “final fix, I promise”.