Blog
While the defacto way of running postgres on Azure Pipeline according to this guide seems to be using the docker image, the MacOS image on Azure Pipeline does not have docker support due to some licensing issue. So instead, this has to be setup and handled manually. We’d use brew here since it comes installed in the OS image and is the easiest way to deal with it as far as I’m aware. ...
July 18, 2021
Component and Unit Testing with Test Coverage
When working on a project with Vue (TypeScript), I faced a lot of roadblocks trying to get code coverage to work. The issue is largely covered in this issue thread. Most solutions / workarounds for that seems to revolve around changing the bundling flow with webpack. Considering my lack of familiarity with webpack (on top of my use of scss and pug in Vue files), putting together a webpack config that works for me turns out to be extremely challenging. That somewhat prompted me to move the build and test process away from vue-cli while starting to experiment with different tools that could work. One thing to note is that, I’ll be using babel to handle TypeScript compiling / transpiling instead of ts-node as recommended from Ava’s guide. ...
May 22, 2021
I wrote code that writes code
I was working on a side project where I had the backend and frontend setup to run on different programming languages. As I was working on it, it started to bug me a little that I have to write the same object / struct and enum for each language in use everytime I introduce a new enum or struct. It can also be confusing / dangerous if I updated one side and forget to update the other. ...
August 9, 2020
Developing with Please
I recently started learning about Go to find out what’s all the hype about. So I figured what’s a better way than to build a project out of it? As I was setting up my machine and going through tutorials step-by-step, I was slightly annoyed by the fact that the development of Go projects are limited to inside the $GOPATH. Personally, I have all my side projects stored at the top level of the computer. It might not be the best way to do it but I’m liking that I can see all my projects at one glance. I guess one could argue that you can soft link the folder into the folder inside $GOPATH and I would pretty much achieve the same effect. But it didn’t quite feel right to me, sounds like a really hacky workaround that might not worth the maintenance cost as I switch to a separate machine only to have to do everything all over again. ...
August 7, 2019
Its 2019 now, who writes shell scripts anymore? Am I right? Well, apparently I do. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Shell scripts vs python or perl # There are some good arguments for that here and here which mainly revolve around 2 things: Shell exists in all Unix systems and makes use of system default features. Shell is an “interactive command function” designed to get user inputs during the process of running them. Also, here’s an additional relevant reading about the differences between sh and bash. ...
May 7, 2019
Quick guide to building and unit testing an Alexa Skill
What is Test Driven Development? # According to Wikipedia, it means “Requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the software is improved to pass the new tests, only.” Basically, you would first have to write the test of the software/feature you are developing before you start working on the developing the software/feature itself. Here are a few more articles on the benefits and why you should apply TDD: Test Driven Development by Jan Olbrich Isn’t TDD twice the work? Why should you care? by Navdeep Singh Preparation # Here are a few thing you might want to have set up or installed before getting started: ...
October 29, 2018
NGINX is one magical tool
I own multiple domain names, and each one hosts a different side project. For the longest time, everything that required ‘hosting’ was hosted on Heroku. But their free tier can be quite limited, it can also get costly quickly if you are paying for each separate project. So instead, I decided to explore putting all of them together using NGINX (recommended to me by Jane Manchun Wong). Required Resources # Virtual Private Server (VPS) # You’ll need a virtual server such as DigitalOcean or EC2 by AWS. Personally I uses Vultr (here’s the non-referral link) which costs me about $2.50 / month. ...
August 29, 2018
Having additional backups are never a bad idea
Most people (including myself) host their personal projects on a third-party free Git hosting websites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. While that is sufficient for most people, it is also pretty fun to have your own Git service hosted on your own domain name of choice. While I trust my fellow engineers at these companies, I am using this as a personally backup to those services if anything goes wrong (like GitLab. Though to their credit, they were able to recover most of it). ...
August 20, 2018
Basically a solo hackathon
Few months ago during my job search, I decided that I want to add some new skills to my arsenal (resume) so I went ahead to build a bill splitting webapp (and the month before, an Alexa skill). Granted, the backend was built weeks before during a hackathon (shoutout to HackISU), I’m just focusing on building the UI that makes post requests to the backend. In the process, I also ended up fixing some inherent flaws I left behind in the backend. ...
June 2, 2018
Add that fancy badge onto your GitHub repository README
What is CI and why should I care about it? # CI stands for Continuous Integration which as the name suggests, is an integrated tests that runs continuously on every time when someone pushes a commit (or mostly when opening a Pull Request). As for why is it important, it automates the whole testing modules. Ideally, you would still want to test your changes locally before pushing them to remote but in some occasion where you forgot or the program requires a lot more resources than your current machine can handle, CI comes in very handy. That aside, if your project happen to have people wanting to contribute code, a properly written test with CI will help you in reviewing the changes and ensuring that the contribution would not break the build. ...
April 22, 2018