Tag: tools

  • Node.js built in test runner

    For the longest time, I’ve been using Mocha (test runner) and Chai (assertion library) for my JS testing. They are reliable old friends. One of the effects of the existence of Bun and Deno has been to spur Node onto adding some new features, so after appearing as an experimental feature in 18, the Node…

  • 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…

  • Bruno asserts

    I mentioned Bruno the other day. Although it’s still very much under development, it is shaping up as a great Postman/Insomnia replacement. One of the aspects I’ve been using today is asserts. As part of a request, you can add some asserts – so when you’re hitting an endpoint it will check what status should…

  • We need to talk about Bruno

    I’ve mentioned before that I was using Insomnia as a tool to check my REST APIs as I was developing them, and that I was avoiding Postman (which I guess is more widely used since it’s worth USD5.6 billion) because The only reason I’m using Insomnia instead of Postman is that when I tried Postman,…

  • Hide ‘Problems’ for a file in VS Code

    I’m interested in trying out Pico CSS – a lightweight CSS library, but when I tossed it into my project, the linter found and reported 29 problems. One of my processes is to just keep that problems tab clear as I work, so I’d like that to go away. It’s possible, but only by ‘excluding’…

  • CodePen

    I think I’ve written about CodePen before, its a site that allows users to quickly put together HTML, CSS & JS and see the results as they edit. Users ‘pens’ are public and can be tagged, so it also serves as a repository of examples. It’s possible to host incredibly complex artefacts, such as this…

  • Digital Color Meter

    For the Calculator project, I needed to know the exact RGB values for the colours on the iOS calculator buttons so I could reproduce them. Assuming a tool for reading colours from the screen exisited, I googled it, and was surprised to find this exact tool is already installed by default on MacOS. It’s called…

  • Lost in Translation

    We’re in a pretty good place now (compared to a few years ago) in terms of being able to rely on JavaScript behaving the same on different platforms. There’s still some differences (mostly in when things are implemented) but overall, not to bad once you decide to no longer support Internet Explorer. In times past,…

  • CodePen.io

    I quite often leave a link to a GitHub repo to share my source in these posts, and on a few recent ones, a link to a live version of a page on my github.io. In a recent installment of CWD, Andrei shared some previous students’ solutions, and some were hosted on CodePen.io which I…

  • Running Javascript in VS Code

    I’ve been using the Live Server plugin to see HTML & CSS updated as I edit, and that will also be useful when I start using Javascript for web development, but as you can see above, I’m not quite up to that. It seemed there should be a way to run JS in VS Code,…