The hype surrounding Svelte right now is inescapable. Every blog post comment section, the article comment section on Dev.to or Twitter thread/hot take seems to solicit a response about Svelte. If you are not familiar, Svelte is a Javascript library which leverages a compiler to turn your Svelte code into plain old Javascript and HTML. You write your applications inside of .svelte files and they get compiled to something that has no runtime.
Wallaby.js is one of the most amazing additions you can make to your testing workflow. I have been a happily paid user for a couple of years now and if you are looking to up your testing game, I highly recommend it. Chances are if you are reading this post, you already use Wallaby and you are looking to get it working in your Aurelia applications with Jest and TypeScript. It’s a combination that is not all too uncommon these days, TypeScript is the future.
A little over a year ago I took a new job and because the office is close to an hour and a half away, I wanted to work remotely for most of the week. Commuting upwards of three hours a day five times a week would have destroyed me. So, while I don’t work 100% of the week remotely, I work two days in the office and three days at home. Everyone has their own experiences working remotely, and I thought it would be interesting to share my perspective and experience.
I recently encountered an error in GitKraken after a bad merge occurred when trying to merge in some changes from the main development branch, whilst I had quite a few local changes that GitKraken usually automatically stashes for me. My problem was I was using Bash Ubuntu on Windows, which has a nasty habit of locking files. The merge and stashing seemed to fail because in the changes I was attempting to merge in, some files were deleted. I tried closing and reopening GitKraken, but it was clear that GitKraken wasn’t going to let me open up that repo again.
I generally avoid promoting things on my blog, but this month I am a part of the Infostack Ultimate Programmer Super Stack, my Aurelia book is a part of this fantastic bundle. For $47.95 you get my Aurelia For Real World Web Applications book, as well as a few other programming books and courses. A whole wide variety of topics are covered, and if you’re like me, you lap these kinds of bundles up because you’re always hungry to learn something new.
Recently I read a Medium article titled, Something is wrong on the internet in which the author delves into the weird and worrying world of directly targeted children’s content, usually using popular TV and movie characters from primarily Disney franchises. As a father of a two and a half year old, this article resonated with me greatly. My wife and I actually kept our child away from iPad’s and technology until he was 23 months old (so basically two). It wasn’t until we took a long trip to the UK to see relatives (22 hours, not including stop over waiting time) that we decided we needed to take something to keep him preoccupied.
The hardest part about blogging is thinking of what you should say. For me, this blog has become focused heavily on Aurelia and Javascript, blogging about other things occasionally. I tend to stick within the front-end development niche. When it comes to blog post ideas, believe it or not: Stack Overflow has been a very influential part of my writing. I’ve written blog posts that were inspired by problems with cool solutions or niche features in a framework not many are aware of.
Kind of a strange post from what I usually post, but the last few months I have been addicted to entering online competitions. The fact I have won a few great prizes in just a few months probably helps. I won a runner up prize which was an LG television and then I won a Weber Baby Q Titanium barbecue. I also scored a free double pass to see the movie Office Christmas Party complete with free drink and popcorn. The movie wasn’t that great, but it was a night out for me and my wife.
Ads have never sat well with me. For a while I have had them on this blog, because it gets a lot of traffic. However, inspired by Troy Hunt, I have decided to remove the Google ads and instead start a Patreon page where anyone can pay a monthly amount to “sponsor” me. By no means are you under obligation to sponsor me. I realise the economy isn’t so kind to everyone, but for those who see the value in my content and would like to see more created on a regular basis, this is your chance.
Update: Site is operational and working again. The last couple of months this blog has grown tremendously. Even though I have caching and other performance tweaks in place, the server my site runs on is surprisingly barebones. The traffic to this blog is around 100k visitors per month, the single core CPU just wasn’t cutting it anymore and a dreaded memory leak with caching that seemingly wouldn’t go away no matter how many times I tried to fix it.