Posts

Programming on a Curved Monitor

A few years ago, I ditched the concept of a dual monitor setup as 30"+ displays started to come down in price, and getting a single large monitor instead of multiple smaller ones made more sense. After using my trusty Samsung SJ55W 34" widescreen for a while, I recently tired of the widescreen monitor. It’s not that it didn’t meet my needs; it’s the fact that I program and do stream and screen recording.

I tried TailwindCSS for the first time

After avoiding Tailwind for such a long time, I finally decided to sit down and see what the hype was all about and use it with Aurelia 2. There are some pros and cons, some complications but it was a surprisingly positive experience.

Aurelia 2 vs Svelte — The battle of two front-end underdogs

In this video, I compare some basics like reactivity, component creation and events in Aurelia 2 and Svelte. You’ll notice some similarities between the two but a few differences in the approach to bindables and component creation.

It’s 2022. We’ve Suffered Enough: Developers Use Whatever You Want

I am an avid reader of Medium, and it’s no secret that the quality of Medium articles has gone downhill over the last couple of years. Clickbait articles are intentionally titled and written to garner a response but lack substance. Amongst the shining gems, is a pile of faeces. One recently caught my eye. An article titled. It’s 2022, Please Don’t Just Use “console.log” Anymore. You are probably already rolling your eyes at the title without even reading the article.

A review of the Elgato Facecam

Before the pandemic, webcams were not really on the mind of most. Many used the inbuilt camera on their laptops or phones for any video-related calls. But, as we were all asked to stay home and virtual meetings became the norm, the pandemic was very kind to the webcam industry. For streamers and content creators, webcams aren’t an afterthought. While the top-tier professionals use expensive DSLR cameras and links, many use a good old-fashioned webcam.

Building with Aurelia 2: Episode #1 — Search autocomplete with term highlighting

Because I love punishing myself and loading my plate with more things, I have embarked on a new Aurelia 2 series called Building with Aurelia 2. During this series, viewers will see how easy and fun it is to build Aurelia 2 user interfaces and applications. Since developers have many choices when it comes to frameworks and libraries, I figured a series where developers are shown with real examples of how easy it is to build with Aurelia 2 would be better than more blog posts telling you how great it is.

What Button Covers to Use on Your Quad Cortex?

The Quad Cortex is an amazing modeller, and since buying one in October 2021, I use it many times a week (the perks of having it on your desk). However, despite how incredible the modeller is, the rotary stomps can be a little small for non-desktop use. If you’re gigging or using it with your feet, the small stomps can be tricky, and you can accidentally press the wrong rotary button.

Reliably waiting for network responses in Playwright

Playwright makes what used to be complicated in end-to-testing almost too easily, especially waiting for network requests. However, in the case of single-page applications (SPA) where a click on a link or button maybe fire a request but not a page load, you can encounter a situation where Playwright encounters a race condition between clicking and waiting for a response. The issue is sometimes the waitForResponse in situations where the request might be faster than the click event finishing, it acts as if it never took place and times out. This issue is acknowledged in the Playwright documentation for page.waitForResponse.

How To Test Your Web Applications Using Playwright and Support 2fa Tokens

At work, I’ve been migrating us over from Cypress to Playwright for end-to-end tests. In that time, we’ve enabled two-factor authentication functionality in our application for security. These TOTP tokens are great for security but provide an additional challenge for testing. While Playwright supports saving state, our application tokens have a short expiry. I needed to log in to our application, enter a one-time password, and test. The logging-in part was easy. We created development environment credentials. But because 2fa is enabled in all environments, we still had the issue of needing a TOTP token.

How to debug the output from within WordPress filters

WordPress has a great actions and filters system allowing you to create injection points for modifying parts of your code (especially for plugin authors). However, you probably arrived here because you’re trying to echo or print_r something from within a filter and not seeing the output. Because WordPress operates on a post/redirect approach, it means you’re not seeing the output because the page has been reloaded. You need to kill the script from within your filter callback function to see the output.