Category: web dev

  • Copying Objects in JS

    I’ve paid for a month of Mosh to do his React 18 course, and one of the things he makes a big deal about is not to go too deep with nested objects for your state. As soon as you start to update them it becomes apparent why. Because of the way state works in…

  • CSS for React Components

    If you think back to HTML as being a document with headings and paragraphs and other semantic bits, it made a lot of sense to have the styles (expressed as CSS) separate to the document. This allows us to change the styles without touching the document – perhaps the user wanted a dark theme, needed…

  • React – a To Do Example

    Since I’m on a roll making different versions of the To Do app, this might be a good time to talk about React. React is one of the giants of front end libraries. It’s based on a few big ideas – and to work effectively in React you need to wrap your head around these.…

  • htmx – A To Do Example

    HTMX is an interesting project to me, and I’ve used it a bit in my large collection of 70% completed side projects, but haven’t really discussed it here. The plan for this post is to talk briefly about what it is exactly, then convert a simple ‘conventional’ (HTML/CSS/Javascript) app to htmx and think about some…

  • Testing Node.js apps – Mocha, Chai, and Supertest

    Bruno is a great open source Postman/Insomnia replacement, and I’ve been using it for basic tests of my node servers using the built in asserts and loving it. This is pretty great, and I gather it’s also possible to go beyond this and write tests in JS in Bruno. I believe it also has the…

  • Simple SQLite in Express

    I don’t have experience with SQLite and want to shift one of my apps over from Mongoose since apparently SQLite is much more capable than I imagined. My usual tactic when trying something new is to try and get a minimal project working on it, so what follows is the simplest possible node/express REST API…

  • Gogs, Gitea, Forgejo

    I’ve been really pleased with Gogs – it’s lightweight, was simple to spin up, and has worked perfectly. But then this morning on Mastodon, there’s a post from @Codeberg.org describing a security vulnerability in their Git hosting project Forgejo. This issue also apparently affects Gitea and Gogs – what’s up with that? I actually already…

  • Concurrency and channels in Go

    In the long ago times, I’d done several years of commercial programming before I ever had to worry about dealing with multiple things happening at the same time. Perhaps because of the rarity of this problem, doing it in traditional languages was not always elegant. In the modern world of everything happening on the network,…

  • Date formatting in Go is quirky

    When I’m working in an unfamiliar language, I find its quicker to just ask ChatGPT to write samples of anything I need than to look it up. For instance, last night I needed to format a date in Go, and rather than Google that and pick one of the results and scroll past the ads…

  • Adding Front Matter To mdserver

    The very first issue I opened on mdserver – my server project that serves HTML from markdown files – was that the title of the page (which shows in the browser tab, and is used for browser bookmarks) needed to be set inside the markdown file, rather than generated from the file name. I didn’t…