Job Vranish on Atomic Spin

Simple, Rails-Like Database Migrations Using Knex on AWS Lambda

How to connect AWS Lambda to an RDS database and deploy new code along with a database migration. We solved the problem with Knex.js.

Web Apps

A Simple Way to Implement Timers and Timeouts in Redux

While trying to implement some features that require a lot of timeouts and time measurement of user interactions, we found a simple approach in Redux.

Developer Tools

Local HTTPS During Development with Docker

I found myself pushing code to a test server every time I wanted to run it, which worked, but was annoying. So I went in search of a solution.

Developer Tools

Simple Way to Start (and Stop!) Background Processes in Bash

A Bash script to quickly start and stop multiple processes from the command line during development, while running multiple servers and/or clients.

Ruby

Ruby Queue Pop with Timeout, v.2 (Correctly Handling Spurious Wakeups)

I wrote a queue implementation that provide a timeout to the pop method. Unfortunately, it has a bug caused by spurious wakeups. Here's the fix.

Developer Tools

websocketd – a UNIX Utility for Turning a Script/Utility into a Chart/Animation

websocketd takes the ugly output from a Unix script or utility and turns it into a chart or animation, or even adding a nice interactive UI.

Web Apps

Never Mix Promises and Callbacks in NodeJS

The moral of the story is, don’t call callbacks from inside promises in NodeJS. They will swallow your exceptions unexpectedly.

Development Practices

Debugging Techniques: #1 Break the System into Small Pieces

My PC wouldn’t boot, didn’t even make a sound. I eventually traced the problem down to a particular mounting screw. But how did I figure it out? Debugging!

Developer Tools

Reproducible Builds with NPM (And Why You Should Use Yarn Instead)

I'll show how you can get reproducible builds in NPM, and I'll demonstrate just how much nicer Yarn is than the alternative.

Extracurricular Activities

ReSpeaker – First Impressions + Simple Offline Voice Recognition

Using ReSpeaker to detect simple commands such as “play music” or “activate omega thirteen” and perform an action, without an internet connection.

C & C++

A Super-Simple Makefile for Medium-Sized C/C++ Projects

A simple Makefile for C or C++ that automatically finds sources, determines include flags, and sets up header dependencies.

Embedded Systems

Using Rust in an Embedded Project: A Simple Example

To help with all the gritty details of using Rust on an embedded project, I've written up an overview with a complete example.

Job Vranish

Keep up with our latest posts.