Recursion in the Real World – Using Recursive Algorithms in Web Dev

Recursion (solving smaller and smaller sub-problems until arriving at the base case) has always intrigued me. The first recursive function I ever wrote computed the factorial for n, and it looked like this: def recur_factorial(n): if n == 1: return n else: return n*recur_factorial(n-1)

Taking Advantage of the (Few) Good Parts of CSS

My attitude toward CSS used to be that it is simply unmaintainable. If in the course of development, you think things like: These styles are already a mess, so I can’t make it any worse. I can’t figure out why this is getting overridden, so I’ll just use !important. It seems like these styles are […]

Taming Your Java Environment

You may not be concerned with what version of Java or Node you are using to run your JavaScript on a regular basis. However, setting up a CI build that can run successfully and repeatedly over the years is a pretty crucial endeavor. Here are a few pointers to set up Java and Node properly […]

JavaScript-free Web Development with WebAssembly, Bolero, and F#

A while back, I remember hearing about WebAssembly and how it would finally release the web from the grip of JavaScript. (Languages that transpile to JavaScript don’t cut it). Although WebAssembly doesn’t make the news much these days, it turns out there is quite a bit of work being done in this area. Since I […]

Getting Started with Chart.js – The Easy, Beautiful Way to Chart

Chart.js is a JavaScript tool which allows you to generate charts for a webpage. It is an approachable way to create beautiful charts with little effort. Due to the good examples and solid documentation, it won’t take long to get your data on the page.

Single Sign-On/Sign-Out With SAML 2.0

SAML 2.0 is an authentication protocol, an agreed-upon way to transfer authentication information between parties. It was approved as an OASIS standard in 2005, and there are SAML Protocol Documents with details about the protocol. The protocol is complex (the core document alone is 86 pages) and has a wide range of capabilities. In this post, I’ll scratch […]

A Comprehensive Guide to Fixing Node-Gyp Issues on Windows

node-gyp is a tool that enables the compilation of native add-on modules for Node in multiple platforms. It has widespread use and is included as a dependency in many NPM packages. On most systems, this isn’t an issue, and installing node-gyp with the rest of your packages works as expected. Unfortunately, this is not the case […]

Add Padding to Embedded SVGs for svg-pan-zoom Controls Using JavaScript

A while ago, my current project added support for zooming and panning SVG images. We were able to accomplish this pretty quickly by using the svg-pan-zoom library, which allowed us to easily add UI for pan and zoom controls on top of SVGs. However, after seeing how the control icons appeared over some of our […]

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 […]

Improve Your App with CSS in JavaScript

I’m bootstrapping a web project for the first time in a while, and I was surprised to find that CSS-in-JavaScript libraries are now a thing. Despite my initial surprise, I’ve come to believe it’s actually a great idea.

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