Self-Hosting Your Own Cloud – Part 1: OpenVPN

This is the first post in a series about protecting your privacy by self-hosting, while attempting to maintain the conveniences of public cloud services. I recently became very concerned about online privacy when I discovered that Google was maintaining a list of everything I’ve purchased and every flight I’ve taken. I had known that Gmail […]

HTML Snapshot Testing with Node

It’s been almost a year since my posts on Excel workbook snapshot testing and PDF snapshot testing. Both of these have proven to be very valuable in our automated test suite and have allowed us to easily catch regressions, manually inspect the differences, and then update as needed. Another task on my current project has […]

Generating Excel Files using Node.js and ExcelJS

Recently, I was tasked with writing some code to generate Excel workbooks containing sales data. I implemented the code using a Node module called ExcelJS. I found that this module provides a simple interface to generating documents, and it also supports more advanced functions such as text formatting, borders, formulae, and more.

Running QBASIC in a Browser – My Nostalgic Trip Back to the 1990s

Recently, I saw Windows 95 running under Electron. The project definitely brought up some old memories from when I was young and new to computers in the mid-1990s. Back then, I spent all of my time outside of school learning how to write code in BASIC. I discovered that the Windows 95 under Electron project […]

Finding Records that Don’t Exist in PostgreSQL

I was recently tasked with writing a bit of code to find delivery route stops where nothing has to be unloaded. This code is intended to prevent a delivery driver from stopping at a store when there’s nothing in the truck for that customer that day.

A Simple Approach to Comparing Database Structures

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 […]

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 […]

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.

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 […]

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 […]

Atomic Spin

Atomic Object’s blog on everything we find fascinating.

By: Jordan Nelson

Author: Jordan Nelson