On my current project, we are developing a replacement for a legacy system written in Visual FoxPro that our customer has used for the last couple of decades. Since there is a lot of risk in switching over, we have developed a bi-directional syncing tool that attempts to keep each system up-to-date with changes made in the other. Read more on A Simple Approach to Comparing Database Structures…
Author: Jordan Nelson
Mocking React/Apollo Data Tables for UI Development
Recently, I was tasked with creating a new screen containing a table of data for a project using React and Apollo. In the past, we would typically start by defining the database table, other access layers in between that and a GraphQL query schema, and finally the query on the front end using Apollo. This has been quite tedious, and often, we ended up tweaking the schema many times until we ended up with precisely what the front-end UI needed. Read more on Mocking React/Apollo Data Tables for UI Development…
Excel Snapshot Testing with Node
A couple of weeks after I worked on PDF snapshot testing with Node and GraphicsMagick, I was tasked with writing some code to generate downloadable Microsoft Excel Workbook files. I thought I would use snapshot comparisons again, much as I did with PDF files to automatically detect regressions in the implementation. Read more on Excel Snapshot Testing with Node…
PDF Snapshot Testing with Node and GraphicsMagick
The task I am working on this week involves generating downloadable PDF files for customer and supplier orders. We’d like to drive the implementation using tests and be able to find any regressions in the code automatically.
After looking at different alternatives for accomplishing this, we decided to try a visual snapshot approach similar to the way Jest does snapshot testing.
Read more on PDF Snapshot Testing with Node and GraphicsMagick…
Remote File Editing Over SSH with Visual Studio Code
Recently, I needed to add an entry to the local domain name server on my home network. For many years, I have used Emacs to edit files on the terminal both locally and on remote systems. However, over the past year or so, I’ve become familiar with Visual Studio Code, and I very much enjoy its editing experience. I searched through the available extensions and found one called Remote VSCode.
Read more on Remote File Editing Over SSH with Visual Studio Code…
Simple Database Dump/Restore with Postgres on Heroku
On my current project, we use Postgres instances running on Heroku for both staging and production. Each team member on the project also maintains a local instance of Postgres used for development.
Because the process to translate data from our customer’s legacy database to our new system takes quite some time, we run the process nightly to populate our Postgres instance on our staging server. In addition to our automated test suite which generates and uses its own test data, we found it quite useful to be able to use up-to-date, real-world data during our daily development and ad-hoc testing of our software.
Read more on Simple Database Dump/Restore with Postgres on Heroku…
Building a Siri/iOS HomeKit-Enabled Garage Door Control with Raspberry Pi – Part 4: Door Sensors
This post is the fourth in a series exploring home automation using a Raspberry Pi, each covering a different aspect of the build of a garage door controller:
- Basic hardware acquisition and installation into a project box
- Software installation and code for controlling the door
- Software camera configuration and code streaming video to HomeKit
- Installing and configuring door open/closed sensors
Building a Siri/iOS HomeKit-Enabled Garage Door Control with Raspberry Pi – Part 3: Camera Config & Video Streaming
This post is the third in a series exploring home automation using a Raspberry Pi. Each part covers a different aspect of the build of a garage door controller:
- Basic hardware acquisition and installation into a project box
- Software installation and code for controlling the door
- Software camera configuration and code streaming video to HomeKit
- Installing and configuring door open/closed sensors
Building a Siri/iOS HomeKit-Enabled Garage Door Control with Raspberry Pi – Part 2: Software
This post is the second in a series exploring home automation using a Raspberry Pi, each covering a different aspect of the build of a garage door controller:
- Basic hardware acquisition and installation into a project box
- Software installation and code for controlling the door
- Software camera configuration and code streaming video to HomeKit
- Installing and configuring adding door open/closed sensors and adding an LCD status display
Building a Siri/iOS HomeKit-Enabled Garage Door Control with Raspberry Pi – Part 1: Hardware
This summer, I decided to explore home automation using a Raspberry Pi. I thought that it would be fun to control my garage door with Siri/iOS HomeKit and spent some time building a basic controller using JavaScript and some nice Node.js packages.
Read more on Building a Siri/iOS HomeKit-Enabled Garage Door Control with Raspberry Pi – Part 1: Hardware…