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 […]

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 […]

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.

I recently set out to create my first AWS Lambda function. Of the supported languages, I chose my favorite: F#. In this post, I’ll walk through the process of building a Lambda function in F# and deploying it to AWS. AWS Alphabet Soup Many of Amazon’s web services have famously inscrutable names. After fumbling my […]

WebSockets are a useful tool that allow for two-way communication between a web server and a browser. In this post, I am going to introduce the basics of WebSockets by making a (very) simple chat application using Express, HTML, and vanilla JavaScript.

Cookies, both the tasty kind and the web browsing kind, aren’t new to me. I’ve clicked my fair share of “this site uses cookies” pop-ups, but until recently, I hadn’t encountered cookies in my work as a programmer. Being newly tasked with the configuration and testing of cookies, I realized that, although cookies are ubiquitous […]