Johbo's Notes - Working on the Web

A common need is to bring up a web server ad-hoc to serve out some files via HTTP.

Mercurial is a distributed version control system which allows for very different workflows for your day to day work.

Out of my many aliases and functions, there is one which I use very often when working with Mercurial.

A few months ago I got a hint to try out Spacemacs from beatpanic.

When exploring the Salesforce Migration Tool as an option to propagate change between different Salesforce instances, I faced the problem that custom fields where not accessible by any user.

Recently there was a fix regarding the implementation of fetchgit inside of nixpkgs: Instead of removing every single file that starts with .git, it will now only remove the folder .git.

Back from my Django days, there is one feature which I really liked about the test runner: It gave me a fresh test database for free and did clean up after the test run.

Just got the link shared from a colleague of mine and I think it is worth to read it, especially for people not dealing with JavaScript on a day to day basis: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/A_re-introduction_to_JavaScript I find t…

Running an application in Heroku means that most of the configuration is based on environment variables.

Working with a database will involve at some point a needed change of the schema.

Dumping a PostgreSQL database is more or less straight forward, loading the dump back is a bit trickier compared to that.

Every once in a while a want to get rid on a line from a file called ~/.ssh/known_hosts and it happens that I even know the exact line number which I want to remove.

The idea of EditorConfig is to have a file called .editorconfig in your project repository, so that the editors and IDEs of the participating developers can automatically adjust to it.

I like to use the module smtpd out of Python's standard library when working on code which wants to send out email.

First thoughts on using node2nix to mange a development environment which contains a mix of Python and Node dependencies.

The package collection nixpkgs has a nice way to configure and tweak the package set based on the configuration file ~/.nixpkgs/config.nix.

Around forms and APIs the problem of validating input data and serializing application data into simple data structures occurs on a regular base to me. marshmallow is a Python library which aims to solve this problem and appears to be pretty flexible.

Sometimes I want to install a Python dependency into my working environment just to try out something quickly, and decide afterwards if I want to keep it or not.

A common challenge in a typical software project is that the dependencies of the application and the development environment change over time, and providing an environment to develop the application is a non-trivial task.

Another piece in my technology puzzle to set up a simple blog based on a static site generator is Nix - The Purely Functional Package Manager.

Hello Restructured Text!

"Hello World!"

A nice snippet to get the version from the current nixpkgs on the command line: $ nix-instantiate --eval -E '(import <nixpkgs> {}).lib.nixpkgsVersion' "16.03pre74367.4f3d769"