Here’s the scenario: A coworker is working on a service and you just want to send a quick request to test it. You want to do this without deploying the service somewhere, asking them to send the request for you (or you both want to send requests at the same time), or needing to go through the whole process of asking this coworker to push the latest to their branch, pulling it down, and setting it up on your machine.
How to tell what is running on a specific port on localhost
Have you ever tried to run a server on a specific port only to find out that it was already in use? I ran into this issue just the other day. The problem was I kept using CTRL-C
to stop the server and it wasn’t gracefully shutting down. I’ll share the short-term fix and then the long-term one.
Javascript magic show
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the Javascript magic show!
Today we will explore a few mysterious and tantalizing feats of magic. Hold on to your socks as we dive into the first trick.
Read moreThe art of troubleshooting
One day you’re chugging along on a problem and things are going great. You’ve harnessed the spirit of Csikszentmihalyi with incredible dexterity and before you know it, you’re waist deep in the highly sought after “flow” state. Code is just flowing from your fingers and thumbs as if they were 10 little magic wands casting spells on your keyboard. You wave at all the chumps still planning, thinking, and architecting behind you. Then all of the sudden something goes terribly wrong. The code you were pretty sure would theoretically work doesn’t actually work. Worse still, there’s no manner of sorcery nor magic wands at your keyboard, just little splatters of grease from your fingers still caked with the pizza rammed into your face about 10 lines of code ago.
Reflections on Batman and my Toastmasters experience
I’m going to start this with a few quotes from the Dark Knight Batman trilogy. You may be asking yourself, “What does Batman have to do with public speaking or my Toastmasters experience?” Read on to find out.
Nine career tips for new software engineers
It struck me the other day that I’ve been programming at work in some capacity for nearly ten years and as my main professional responsibility for six. Over the course of that time I’ve learned a few things, some of them the hard way, and I’d like to share a few of those things here.
I quit my job to travel through Asia and it didn’t derail my career
About a year ago, I quit my job to travel with my girlfriend across Asia for 6 months. When I told the people in my life about my plans, I heard many different reactions. Some thought I was nuts: “How are you going to explain this gap in your employment history?” “Won’t you have trouble finding work?” “Isn’t that irresponsible?”
10 things I learned while building my first app in React Native
Are you a React developer thinking about making the leap to React Native to build apps for iOS and Android? Read on to find out what I learned while writing and publishing my first React Native app, Fitness Routine Timer.
How I learned React and Redux
React is everywhere these days and growing fast. I think for this reason, many people are trying to learn how to use this framework. My journey towards learning this framework started with the many small tutorials floating around on the internet. I felt pretty confident after a few and attempted to build a bucket list app with authentication.
Holy smokes did reality knock me flat on the ground. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to implement the minimum functionality and encountered a few walls. It gradually became clear that I needed a better understanding of the fundamentals of how React and Redux worked together.