Posts

Rocket League: Nintendo Switch Review

This has been one of the most anticipated games for me on the Nintendo Switch ever since the console was released. I own Rocket League already on PC and Playstation 4, and you would assume the hype would have been lost on me: nope. If you’re new to Rocket League or not familiar with it, it’s a physics heavy arena-based soccer game where you knock a soccer ball around with a car. There are two teams and the aim is to get as many goals as possible before the time runs out.

Karma and Sauce Launcher Issue (tests timing out/not running on Sauce Labs)

This is a bug I recently encountered with Karma and the Karma Sauce Launcher plugin. It plagued me for a week, finally I worked out the issue and I had to share the solution incase anyone else encountered the same thing. The issue I encountered was none of the SauceLabs tests would run. It would say it was spinning up a remote browser on SauceLabs, but no proxy was being created and eventually everything would just time out.

How To Convert FormData To JSON Object

Recently, whilst working on a project I needed to take HTML FormData and then convert it to JSON to be sent off to an API. By default the FormData object does not work in the way you would want it to for JSON. Using the for..of syntax introduced in ECMAScript 2015, we can access the form data entries and iterate over them to get key and value pairs. This will be the verbose solution, scroll to the bottom to get the cleaner solution using .reduce below.

The Decline of Medium.com

I still fondly remember when Medium first hit the scene. Everyone loved the quality of the writing and variety, every article I read was seemingly well-written and of high quality. Fast forward to 2017 and Medium has become the equivalent of a never-ending TED Talk. Everyone wants to improve my life and tell me how to be a better person. The good articles are still there, but there is a serious imbalance of content going on, with the “X things you need to do for a better life” or “How to be a better X”

How To Change/Overwrite Colours In Bootstrap 4

Well, this one just stung me and a client after migrating from Bootstrap v3 over to v4 in a project. In Bootstrap of yesteryear, you overrode colours using separately named variables like $brand-primary if you’re new to v4, you’ll probably try and use variables like these and discover they do nothing. In Bootstrap v4 colours have been moved into a Sass map. This means separate variables for colours no longer exist. The theme colours are now defined inside of Bootstrap’s variables file here which is a map of colours using similar names from v3.

Webpack Support Lands In Aurelia CLI

I have been waiting for this day to come for a long time now: the Aurelia CLI now supports scaffolding Webpack applications from scratch. My biggest gripe with the skeletons the Aurelia team provide is they have a lot of stuff in them I have to remove for every new project. Admittedly, the skeletons serve to showcase how a functional Aurelia application could look like — but make a lot of assumptions on things like using a router or Fetch to make HTTP requests.

Seo.fit: SEO analysis

For a while I’ve had a great domain name just lying around and it dawned on me what it could be a while ago, so I decided to use seo.fit for a SEO analysis tool that gives you SEO information about a domain and improvements. The purpose seemed fitting for the domain. It’s not an original idea because there are tonnes of these sites around and admittedly, it didn’t take hardly any effort but it’s a step in the right direction for me by actually following through on my side project ideas and launching them.

How To Alias Cloud Functions In Firebase

Firebase Cloud Functions are fantastic, but the URL that you get to run them isn’t so nice. You’ll get given a URL that looks like the following when you create some cloud functions: https://us-central1-demoapp.cloudfunctions.net/functionName If you are wanting to use Firebase to build an API for your application for example (like I wanted to), then you would probably prefer your URL looks like this: https://myapp.com/functionName Fortunately, you can. The only downside is you have to use Firebase hosting if you want to be able to alias your functions to your name. If you’re self-hosting your own site somewhere else and using Firebase, then you can’t alias cloud functions.

TidyFork: Cleanup Outdated Forks and Old Starred Repositories

As a developer, I love Github and use it to not only contain my public and private development projects, but also follow other interesting projects. Sometimes I’ll fork a project if I want to contribute to it or star a repository if I am interested in using it now or later. I joined Github on August 18, 2010 so I have been an active member of Github for seven years now.

Create an alias to C drive in Ubuntu Bash on Windows

If you’re using the fantastic Ubuntu Bash terminal in Windows 10 which gives you a proper Ubuntu Linux terminal window and subsystem, you’re probably wanting to access files on your main drive. To get to your C drive which has your files, you can just type: cd /mnt/c I don’t know about you, but typing that is painful. By creating an alias in your .bashrc file which is a configuration file for the Ubuntu terminal instance, you can create a shortcut to the C drive (and other mounted drives as well).