Scripting Bits

Random Ideas About Programming Languages

Keeping up with current research

Being employed as an application developer limits my ability to get better at writing software. The job is a box that constrains my perspective to one codebase and the knowledge contained in one team…

Per-Environment Configuration

It’s a well-established practice to supply credentials and environment-specific configuration to a web app via environment variables.

By “environment-specific”, I mean specific to a particular instance of the running web app. That could be the web app…

Creating Trusted Self-Signed Certificates

When developing a web app and testing features that require HTTPS, the most straightforward way is to generate a self-signed certificate for localhost.

The problem with this approach is I have to click through pesky security…

Interacting with Code

Through different mediums

When we interact with a codebase, by default, it’s through a text editor. We dig through directories to find the file containing the code we want to see. Then, we might dig through a different set of directories to find a different file…

Everyday Scripting

I recently realized that I write code more often than I realize. Aside from writing JavaScript in my editor, I often:

• Type key combinations in VIM
• Type BASH into the terminal
• Use Regular Expression searches in various…

Writing and Testing CLI Tools

My last few bits of code have all been CLI tools. CLI tools usually consist of imperative code that is hard to abstract and hard to test. Because they tend to perform many side-effects, test cases have to take extra steps to achieve good isolation.

Speeding Up ESLint

ESLint is pretty slow, especially after adding a bunch of plugins.

Today, I happened to notice that on my project of 8 files, it’s equally slow with the whole project as it is with a single file — 3 seconds. This led me to believe that most of the time is spent loading…

Writing npm packages that support both Node.js and the browser

Nowadays, it’s important, when writing a new package, to ask where the code should be able to run. With many popular packages supporting both environments as well as the prevalence of compilers, the cost-benefit of…