Recently, I was interested in creating a Google Chrome extension that would work similarly to a password manager, such as LastPass, to monitor the data in form submissions. Working on this task is actually what led to my last blog post, a lighthearted take on my mental stages of programming. Read more on Collecting Form Data with a Google Chrome Extension…
JavaScript
Multiple HTTP Requests for an AngularJS + Google Sheets Prototype
As I continued to build out my AngularJS + Google Sheets prototype, I ran into another problem. I wanted to load the data from two Google Sheets and access the data in the same function. I created this example, which loads in one Sheet with weather forecasts and another with weather types and descriptions, as a proxy. Read more on Multiple HTTP Requests for an AngularJS + Google Sheets Prototype…
Using Decorators to Declaratively Extend Functions
The decorator pattern gained fame in the object-oriented world after being featured in the classic 1994 Gang of Four book, Design Patterns. Since then, it’s been used extensively in traditional object-oriented programming as an alternative to inheritance. What’s really going on behind the scenes though, is composition, which means decorators are also great for cleaning up some functional programming boilerplate.
We’re going to look at decorators in JavaScript, along with some proposed syntax sugar coming in ES2017 that will make it easier to use them. Read more on Using Decorators to Declaratively Extend Functions…
Never Mix Promises and Callbacks in NodeJS
When using Node.js, you should never mix promises and callbacks. It’s a recipe for confusion. The problem is pretty obvious in hindsight, but it sure threw me for a loop the first time I ran into it.
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GraphQL + Apollo – Part 2: Building a Server
In this series, we are taking a dive into GraphQL through the lens of the Apollo toolchain. Part 1 of the series explains some core concepts of GraphQL and introduces Apollo as a GraphQL solution. In this post, we will take a closer look at building a GraphQL server with Apollo tools. Part 3 will take a look at the Apollo Client libraries and implement an example client. Read more on GraphQL + Apollo – Part 2: Building a Server…
GraphQL + Apollo – Part 1: An Introduction
This past September, I attended the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. Among the plethora of great talks that I attended was one about GraphQL, given by Lee Byron. This talk, supplemented by a great deal of research, convinced me that I should use GraphQL in the project that I started a couple of months ago.
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Lazy Sequences with ECMAScript 6 Generators
Generators are an ES6 feature that started receiving a lot of attention a few years ago because of their potential to ease some of the pain associated with writing asynchronous code. However, with the emergent async/await proposal (mere syntax sugar around generators and promises), some of the shine has worn off, and generators aren’t getting the same amount of attention they used to.
This is a shame, because even if you disregard their uses in asynchronous code, generators are still pretty cool in their own right. I’m going to explore some of the ways you can use them to implement lazy sequences.
Read more on Lazy Sequences with ECMAScript 6 Generators…
Pixels and Palettes: Extracting Color Palettes From Images
Color palettes are usually carefully hand-selected to reflect a desired design aesthetic. Although there have been some attempts to procedurally generate palettes, automated palette creation is very difficult. It’s easy to choose some random colors, but generating a coherent and aesthetically pleasing palette in an automated way is not easy.
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Custom QUnit Assertions
QUnit is a popular testing framework for JavaScript, and it’s included in the box when you generate a new Ember CLI project. In this post, we’ll use custom assertions to improve the legibility of our tests and their results. Read more on Custom QUnit Assertions…
Sharing Web Data with iOS Using WKWebView
I recently helped develop a native iOS app for a client that sells software to many different educational organizations. We wrote the app in Swift, and it interacts with our client’s pre-existing web API.
One challenge we faced was that many of our client’s customers require single-account, multiple-login (SAML) support through their own web portals. To support SAML, we needed an easy way to pass a user’s API credentials from a web page to our iOS application. In this post, I’ll show how this can be accomplished using WKWebView.
Read more on Sharing Web Data with iOS Using WKWebView…