Blog

Restart your app and not your tunnel with ngrok and nodemon

When I am developing web applications in Node.js, I like the server to restart when I make changes, so I use nodemon. When I am developing an application that consumes webhooks or that I want to share publicly, I use ngrok. In fact, I like ngrok so much, I volunteered to help maintain the Node.js wrapper for ngrok.

How to display dates in your user's time zone with the Intl API

Time zones are hard. Not only are there a lot of them, but they don’t fit nicely into whole hour blocks, daylight savings time changes individual zones some of the time, and zones move around and change all the time. In short, it is a hassle.

How to stream file downloads in Node.js with Got

Got is a Node.js library for making HTTP requests. It has both promise and stream based APIs and in this post I want to explore how to use the stream API to download files.

I built a VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode

Over the Easter weekend, a four day weekend characterised by lockdowns all over the world, I decided to use the extra time I had at home to start a new project and learn a new skill. By the end of the weekend I was proud to release my first VSCode extension: ngrok for VSCode.

Making a responsive Twitch Embed

I’ve been trying out streaming live code on Twitch which is a lot of fun. I wanted to share on my own site that I was streaming so I have built a page dedicated to it. The page will evolve, but one of the first things I wanted to include on it was an embed of my Twitch stream and chat.

The story of a mildly popular Ruby gem

The list on GitHub of repositories that depend on your repository is scary.

Mistakes I've made treating file paths as strings

Some things you do as a developer can work for you for years, then turn around and bite you when you were least expecting. These are the things that you wish another developer had told you early in your career so you never had to make the mistakes. This post is about one of those things and if you’re reading this, consider it me telling you.

How to find CFPs for developer conferences

So you’ve decided to speak at a developer conference? You have a story you want to share with your peers—how you built something, how you learned something new, how you became a better developer and how everyone else can too—but you need to find a stage on which to share this story.

Testing signed and encrypted cookies in Rails

Recently I’ve been refactoring the tests for a gem I maintain and I needed to test that it sets the right cookies at the right time. But the cookies in use in the gem are signed cookies and that caused a slight hiccup for me. I’d never tested the value in a signed cookie before and it wasn’t immediately obvious what to do.

How not to sort an array in JavaScript

Array sorting is one of those things you don’t spend too long thinking about, until it stops working for you. Recently I was working with array of items in JavaScript that were not sorting at all properly and completely messing up an interface. It took me way too long to work out what went wrong so I wanted to share what happened and why it was so weird.