NotesToSelf.Dev

Twitter Cards and Facebook’s OpenGraph provide semi-standardised markup for describing web content to social media and other aggregators.

“…some service maintained by one person that’s built their little impregnable abstraction castle because nobody else had to work on it so they could just yak-shave and bike-shed with their self.”

The order confirmation page on our 3D cards shop is shown to a customer after they complete checkout, and is also linked to in the confirmation and dispatch emails that they receive.

Dates and times are notoriously difficult to get right in software.

I usually write tests with a Given, When, Then structure to keep the test focused on documenting and confirming the important behaviour of whatever is being tested.

I run a few side projects on various domains, and often want to be able to send and receive email on those domains.

I run a couple of sites related to my Chinese studies: an East Asian Studies blog, and a Chinese learning resource site.

(Cross-posted from https://blog.freetrade.io/end-to-end-serverless-testing-with-the-driver-pattern-bcf2d22bf73a) In September 2019, Freetrade’s test code consisted of a large number of fast unit tests and a smaller number of end-to-end API tests.

A little note to avoid bugs in tests, or missing bugs: don’t use the current date or time when writing unit tests.

It’s widely known (although somehow still controversial) that investment managers who try to manually pick stocks cannot beat the market the vast majority of the time: “Active fund managers trail the S&P 500 for the ninth year in a row in triumph for inde…

I was reading about decision fatigue and wondering if it accounts for more major events than we give it credit for.

The second puzzle in Joe Celko’s SQL Puzzles is about tracking employee absenteeism.

Test Driven Development can be a business process, not just a development workflow.

The first puzzle in SQL Puzzles is about adding strong constraints to ensure correctness of data in a table that looks like this: CREATE TABLE fiscal_years ( fiscal_year integer, start_date date, end_date date ) Making all the columns NOT NULL is a go…

I recently started using Mailcoach, mainly for sending emails to the subscriber list for Chinese Boost.

I’ve been looking forward to the release of Mailcoach, which is a self-hosted mailing list manager app.

“Better alive than right” is a kind of proverb I try to remind myself of when cycling in London on a daily basis.

“Eating the recipe” is a term I’ve made up to try and describe the kind of mistakes that get made by mixing up levels of abstraction.

The concept of bike shedding is one of my favourites, as once you’ve learnt about it, it won’t be long before you see it in the wild at most organisations.

It’s hard to write software that is easy to maintain and adapt to change.

I’m setting up a small side-business selling wall art prints in the UK, and needed to think of a short, reasonably unique name.

Your dev workflow is a business process too.

While working at Freetrade, I made the ts-firebase-driver-testing library to allow rapid testing and debugging of Firebase applications (other engineers have contributed to it since then).

The Interface Segration Principle is one of the more overlooked parts of SOLID.

I love sequence diagrams and other kinds of visual documentation of a system, especially ones that are committed in the repo alongside the application code.

We handle the accounting for our pop out cards shop using Xero.

There’s a common gotcha when using commandline tools that have their own file globbing, such as Prettier in Nodejs.

Making a hybrid static + dynamic site can be quite a useful combination.

Here’s a quick and simple way to create type-safe test mocks with Jest in TypeScript: const fooMock: jest.Mocked<IFoo> = { fooMethod: jest.fn() } const testSubject = new ClientClass(fooMock); This has a few useful properties: The type system will enfor…

Something that can be slightly tricky to achieve within Hugo’s taxonomy system is linking to the previous and next page within a particular taxonomy term.

Tests are improved by being more readable, and concise tests are more readable.

Building on the object path enumeration, we can also make a deep object diff or delta.

Here’s a small recursive TypeScript function to enumerate all the paths through an object.

Here’s a question that might give some insight into the quality of your codebase: Can you have multiple instances of your application in a single process?

If you want a good screenshot tool on Ubuntu, Deepin Screenshot is probably the best one.

Here’s a quick HTML template snippet to do something I find is quite a common task in a Hugo site: show a list of other pages that share a taxonomy term with the current page.