Adding Newlines to all Files in Git (3 mins read).
Adding newlines at the end of all Git-tracked files.
Adding Newlines to all Files in Git (3 mins read).
Adding newlines at the end of all Git-tracked files.
Adding Calendar details on events pages (1 mins read).
Adding an iCalendar event as well as an 'Add to Google Calendar' link for each event on this site.
Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin
Recommended read: Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin https://nicolas-hoizey.com/2017/11/medium-is-only-an-edge-server-of-your-posse-cdn-your-own-blog-is-the-origin.html
Bookmark of https://martinfowler.com/articles/oss-lockin.html
Recommended read: Bookmark of https://martinfowler.com/articles/oss-lockin.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/oss-lockin.html
Introducing a Microformats API for Meetup.com: meetup-mf2.jvt.me
(4 mins read).
Announcing the Microformats translation layer for Meetup.com events.
Bookmark of https://gitpi.us/post/drew-devault-interview/
Recommended read: Bookmark of https://gitpi.us/post/drew-devault-interview/ https://gitpi.us/post/drew-devault-interview/
I will be attending ⚡️Lightning Talks!⚡️ on
I will be attending Women in Tech September 2019 - Elevating to Expert: brand enhancement on
I will be attending IndieWebCamp Amsterdam on
I'm looking forward to my first IndieWebCamp, as well as visiting Amsterdam again with Anna. We're planning on taking a couple days' holiday post-IWC, so that should be really nice too!
This is quite an interesting little gotcha that many may not know (for instance I did not) about a 75GB limit of storage of Lambdas.
Recommended read: The Dark Side of AWS Lambda https://medium.com/fluidity/the-dark-side-of-aws-lambda-5c9f620b7dd2
Continuous Verification of Friday Deploys
I quite like this idea. As https://charity.wtf puts it, we should be comfortable with deploying no matter what day or time of the week, because our tooling and processes should give us confidence. It's an antipattern and a sign that something is wrong if we don't want to do it.
But at the same time, you don't want to be staying up late on a Friday because someone pushed something, and then have it potentially ruin your weekend.
It's definitely a hard line to walk, but as this article says, we should opt for something a bit more risky, to give us more confidence
Recommended read: Continuous Verification of Friday Deploys http://willgallego.com/2019/08/23/continuous-verification-of-friday-deploys/
Making it easier to determine the kind
of content for Indie posts (2 mins read).
Adding a kind
hint to my Indie post types to make it easier to look through each content kind.
I will be attending Homebrew Website Club Nottingham on
I will be attending Homebrew Website Club Nottingham on
Bookmark of https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1166390671705612293
I've been using DuckDuckGo for a couple of years now, and have no complaints. The privacy baked into the product is great, and their extensibility for things like !gh
to search on GitHub or searching "html pretty print" is awesome for quick productivity boosting.
I'd recommend you giving it a go, and see how you feel after a while. And if you're finding search results aren't so great every so often, you can !g
to get your Google results!
Recommended read: Bookmark of https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1166390671705612293 https://twitter.com/DuckDuckGo/status/1166390671705612293
Encrypted Partitions in Ubuntu
Recommended read: Encrypted Partitions in Ubuntu https://annadodson.co.uk/blog/2019/08/18/partitioning-in-ubuntu/
Setting Up a Micropub Server for www.jvt.me (7 mins read).
Announcing the creation of my Micropub server, to allow publishing content away from my laptop/desktop.
This is a really great post about how we should look to use our time more wisely. Taking time to create something new instead of just consuming others' content, especially as you're all going to have some really interesting things to share.
However, we also need to remember that it's OK to have downtime, and consuming others' content is ok! (And yes, this is a little ironic coming from me, a person who is seemingly always productive and pushing out new content)!
Recommended read: Consume less, create more https://tjcx.me/posts/consumption-distraction/
Introducing Strong Customer Authentication: What you need to know
This blog post from Monzo is such a good explanation of what the Strong Customer Authentication regulations are, especially coming from someone who's been working on it for some time. It's going to be interesting to see how the industry works at making it secure, but unobtrusive to the customer - as it's something that could cause quite a User Experience difficulty, at the risk of providing real security for our users.
Recommended read: Introducing Strong Customer Authentication: What you need to know https://monzo.com/blog/2019/08/22/strong-customer-authentication
How to RSVP to an Indie Event from your Website (4 mins read).
How to use your personal website in conjunction with Microformats and Webmention to be able to RSVP to Indie events.
AWS Nottingham: Where Did All the Money Go? (13 mins read).
A writeup of the AWS Nottingham meetup about cost saving in AWS.
Absolute scale corrupts absolutely
This is an interesting article about how the increased size of the Internet is a cautionary tale for whether things need to be on the Cloud / accessible from the Internet.
Recommended read: Absolute scale corrupts absolutely https://apenwarr.ca/log/20190819
George RR Martin: 'Game of Thrones finishing is freeing, I’m at my own pace'
This interview with George RR Martin is incredibly insightful into how George has been dealing with the TV series of Game of Thrones overtaking his literary pieces, and I'd really recommend a read to see his thought processes and the pros and cons of his writing being behind.
Recommended read: George RR Martin: 'Game of Thrones finishing is freeing, I’m at my own pace' https://theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/18/george-rr-martin-interview-game-of-thrones-at-own-pace-now
It's all Greek to me: Thoughts on code readability and aesthetics
Readability of code is a very important, but so is using idiomatic language style. However the difficulty, as this article calls out, is that some folks won't find it easy to read or write code in an 'idiomatic' way. And also, who cares if you convert the readable four-line code snippet into a horrible to read one-liner? All it does is make it harder for the next person!
Recommended read: It's all Greek to me: Thoughts on code readability and aesthetics https://avraam.dev/posts/greek-to-me/
YAML: probably not so great after all
This is a great read about some of the risks of using YAML, especially the way that most YAML parsers default to executing arbitrary, unsafe commands from a file you're parsing.
Recommended read: YAML: probably not so great after all https://arp242.net/yaml-config.html
I've used this server before to get a simple RESTful API up and running, and it's really useful.
Recommended read: JSON Server https://github.com/typicode/json-server/
Restructuring The Way That My Site's Content Types Work (5 mins read).
How I've restructured my content to map more closely to Microformats for any Indie content types.
GitHub always have a great recap of the new Git releases, and this is another - I'm particularly interested in some of the changes around git checkout
Recommended read: Highlights from Git 2.23 https://github.blog/2019-08-16-highlights-from-git-2-23/
Easily Parsing Failed Cucumber Scenarios from the JSON Report (2 mins read).
How to parse a Cucumber JSON report to display the failed scenarios and their causes.
I will be attending September Double Whammy - Noobs on Ubs and the IndieWeb on
Let's talk about web education
This is another good article talking about the difficulties of working on the Web, with the plethora of technologies 'required' to get even a static website off the ground, let along big business applications. It's something we're all just accepting as a thing that happens (or folks from other tech stacks are ridiculing) but no one is really looking at what we can do to prevent it or make it better.
Recommended read: Let's talk about web education https://getdoingthings.com/blog/lets-talk-about-web-education/
I will not be attending FOSDEM 2020 on
I will be attending Alexa.Net with Steve Pears + Writing Business Apps in F# with Ian Russell on
Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1!
This is a great post talking about some of the real difficulties of working in the Web ecosystem. It helps paint a picture of some problems that plague the folks working on it, and is a great view for someone who isn't as used to web development.
Recommended read: Why is modern web development so complicated? A long yet hasty explanation: Part 1! https://www.vrk.dev/2019/07/11/why-is-modern-web-development-so-complicated-a-long-yet-hasty-explanation-part-1/
Bookmark of Jessie Frazelle's tweet about the origins of the Apache Web Server's name
Recommended read: Bookmark of Jessie Frazelle's tweet about the origins of the Apache Web Server's name https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/1096487290795450369
Effective API testing with Cucumber
This post has definitely helped my recent scenario writing, and helped to shape the readability (and purpose) of the Cucumber testing I've been doing.
Recommended read: Effective API testing with Cucumber https://www.gregbeech.com/2014/01/19/effective-api-testing-with-cucumber/
Why Community Matters by Digital Lincoln
Recommended read: Why Community Matters by Digital Lincoln https://medium.com/dddeastmidlands/why-community-matters-by-digital-lincoln-3e34c71a57ef
Using OpenSSL Behind a (Corporate) Proxy (1 mins read).
How to use OpenSSL commands when behind a proxy server.
Extract a Secret Key from a Java Keystore (2 mins read).
How to export a symmetric SecretKey
entry from a Java keystore.
Parsing Key-Value URL Fragments with Node.JS (1 mins read).
How to easily parse a URL fragment containing key-value pairs of data, with Node.JS.
I will be attending JS in CSS, the magic of Houdini on
I will be attending Homebrew Website Club Nottingham on
I will be attending Homebrew Website Club Nottingham on
Learn a little jq, awk and sed
This is a great post - I thoroughly recommend learning how to use common commandline tools such as awk
, grep
, sed
, but also adopting a scripting language for more complicated stuff. I don't mean Bash, or another shell scripting language, but something like Node, Python or Ruby, as it'll give you the opportunity for a greater standard library, as well as tonnes of packages built by others.
Recommended read: Learn a little jq, awk and sed https://letterstoanewdeveloper.com/2019/07/29/learn-a-little-jq-awk-and-sed/
I will be attending Tech Nottingham August 2019: Caching and Documenting on
Creating an iCalendar feed for my RSVPs (2 mins read).
How and why I've created a public calendar for the RSVPs I send from this site.
Add your Meetup.com Events to your Calendar (1 mins read).
How to get all your upcoming Meetup.com events straight to your calendar.
WPWeekly Episode 361 – Introduction to the IndieWeb With David Shanske
This should be a really interesting listen about getting started with the IndieWeb with David, I'd recommend it.
But in an even cooler turn of events, it was very cool to see that my article Why I Have a Website and You Should Too ( https://www.jvt.me/posts/2019/07/22/why-website/ ) discussed at roughly 39:00.
Recommended read: WPWeekly Episode 361 – Introduction to the IndieWeb With David Shanske https://wptavern.com/wpweekly-episode-361-introduction-to-the-indieweb-with-david-shanske
Don’t Put Your Work Email on Your Personal Phone
This is a really interest post about the dangers of installing work apps (such as email) on your personal device. This is something I've spent a lot of effort avoiding in the last couple of jobs, as well as going out of my way to not use any personal services (i.e. social media, email) on my work devices, as there is most likely traffic inspection or they are Man-in-the-Middle'ing the traffic, and will therefore be able to glean passwords. Although this seems paranoid, I feel it's a good mindset to have.
This is especially useful because it has a great way of enforcing the separation between home and work. However, there are still ways that this can break down - for instance, I have a work phone which is provided so I can be out of hours on call. However, I have things like email and Slack which allow me to use it throughout the day and reply to messages when I'm not necessarily with my laptop. But that's an issue because that phone goes home with me, even when I'm not on call. I'll find I'm catching up on work on the bus on the way to work, as well as keep in the mindset of work when I'm physically out of the building.
This makes it quite difficult because I'm not really switching off, even though I've said above that I'm trying to keep work and home separate. So what I've been doing for the last few months is leave my work phone at work (as long as I'm not on call!) which means if I've left the office, I'm no longer able to action anything, even if I think about it.
Recommended read: Don’t Put Your Work Email on Your Personal Phone https://onezero.medium.com/dont-put-your-work-email-on-your-personal-phone-ef7fef956c2f
Pretty Printing JSON Files Inline on the Command Line (2 mins read).
How to rewrite multiple JSON files inline on the Command Line.