Important Bits

Written by Adam Sullovey, powered by Gatsby.
Find me on codepen, github, or at Toronto meetups.

Feb 2019 A11yTO meetup

https://www.meetup.com/a11yTO/events/257690771/ b11y.com/talks/aria Use native html elements the right way, and no aria labels will be…

How to use reselect wrong

Using an identity function for resultFunc If you were going to do: You are typing too much, and your selector can be Why is this wrong? The…

What I've learned about selling domain names

I have a 5 letter (not a word) .com domain I don’t use with minimal back links, so I decided to try selling it. 1. False hope? GoDaddy…

Ramda: propOr vs prop + defaultTo are not the same

I thought these two lines would be equivalent, but they aren’t The goal of these lines to look up a property on an object, and provide a…

My dynamodb-admin fork (GUI for DynamoDB local)

I found a browser-based GUI to work with my local DynamoDB instance during development: dynamodb-admin by Aaron Shafovaloff . It’s the…

Proverb Permutations

Let’s use rxjs just for fun. Maybe there’s a better operator for this than . Rmember to use instead of . will not split in the array…

Using AWS CLI tools with MFA enabled on your account

Say your all-powerful and have lost their AWS CLI powers because your Amazon Web Services account is now secured with multi-factor…

Catch This Javascript Error if You Can

A human I know came across code equivalent to this: and asked Can we catch this rejected promise without changing ? My first thought was…

Node.js, "too many open files", and ulimit

Let’s find out what this error really means and how to fix it. Your WebSocket-enabled Node.js backend suddenly logged out this error: Here’s…

Stabilizing GoPro Video with FFmpeg and vid.stab

Here are commands to run vid.stab to stabilize shakey GoPro videos. vid.stab is free software that is integrated into ffmpeg , an open…

Error Boundaries, Squashing HOCs, and Realm @ React Toronto Meetup

Pivotal Labs hosted the React Toronto Meetup this month. Rohan Nair talked about error boundaries in React 16 which can stop an…

Testing in Different Contexts @ Dev West Meetup

Flipp hosted and sponsored this Dev West Meetup . Gabriel Loo talked about his approaches to testing for the 3 different modes he sees…

From WordPress to Hugo

Why? So I can move from shared hosting to static file hosting with Netlify or Firebase and not have to maintain a WordPress site. How…

E2E testing, Infrastructure Testing @ ExploreTech Meetup

Freshbooks hosted us. Andrew Kirkpatrick from Unata talked about behaviour driven development & testing. brief history of testing year…

Wealthsimple, navigation options, Sketch @ React Native Toronto Meetup

WealthSimple hosted us. I didn ’ t write down much. Peter Kruzlics @ WealthSimple showed React Native is working well in their mobile apps…

Layered Approach to Security, Serverless backends @ Toronto AWS Meetup

Serverless Backends w/AWS Lambda & API Gateway Frank and Jay from Anomaly Innovations talked about their experiences with serverless…

Getting Hired & Salary Negotiations @ ExploreTechTO Meetup

TribalScale hosted us for Let ’ s Make A Deal: Insiders’ perspectives on Salary Negotiations in Tech Getting hired & negotiating a salary…

Accessibility, Physical Installations @ CreateInTO Meetup

Accessibility with Alison Walden slides blind and low vision internet users in US are almost as numerous as regular Canadian internet users…

Unity3D, VS Code, OS X and ‘The reference assemblies for framework “.NETFramework,Version=v3.5” were not found’ error

Here’s how I fixed this error. It happened to me in this environment: OS X 10.10.5 Unity 5.6.0b7 VSCode 1.9.1 with C# extension 1.7.0 I had…

Ember.js night @ Full Stack Toronto

I think the location is a secret. Jasna gave a live-coded demo of using Ember to make requests to a RESTful API to do CRUD operations and…

Scrolling performance, Angular 2 Optimizations @ Toronto Web Performance Group Meetup

We met at Shopify ‘ s office. David Bokan from the Google Chrome team in Waterloo talked about scrolling performance in Google Chrome…

Host your own Git LFS with node-lfs-s3

Want to use Git LFS without a Git-as-a-Service provider like GitHub or BitBucket? Stuff you will need AWS S3 to store files at a low cost…

Using Nodejs to record microphone input to mp3 files on Ubuntu

https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-224748.html was very helpful. Install lame mp3 encoder if you don ’ t have it. You should…

ffmpeg: concatenating with image sequences and audio

Goal Assemble multiple image sequences and audio files into 1 video file Assumptions all my images in image sequences are the same…

CSS & Spritesheet generators

I like tools that let me drag and drop a bunch of images into my browser, and generate CSS & a single image for me to integrate into my…

Deploying apps from circleci 1.0 to Firebase hosting

September 2017 update : CircleCI 2.0’s config file format is different than what I describe here which is CircleCI’s 1.0 config format. The…

When Bower install doesn’t work

If you have a bower.json file, and running from the same directory appears to download packages, but not actually put them in your project…

Reusing an ES6 iterator? Not quite

One you ’ ve called on an array iterator enough times to make it return the last item with the property set to true, you can ’ t make it…

Recording & compressing short screencasts on Windows

Tools I use CamStudio with the lossless codec for screen recording ffmpeg a scripting environment with shell access (I chose node.js ) for…

Making shopify.com fast @ TO Web Performance Group Meetup

Bryson Gilbert presented techniques his team uses on Shopify ’ s main marketing site, shopify.com Techniques 10ms goal for generating…

Fixing SSL errors on Android Chrome with RapidSSL

Your ‘ Order: xxxxxxx Complete ’ email from RapidSSL includes links to a bunch of intermediate SSL certificates . Will you install the…

Generating directory structure ASCII art on Windows

Don ’ t feel left out Windows users, you have a command too! Tree documentation is here . I found I couldn ’ t use it from Git bash, but…

Migrating imakewebsites.ca to Hexo

Today I migrated http://imakewebsites.ca from a home-made PHP and MySQL CMS to the Hexo static blogging engine. Moving content over was…

Compile nginx with RTMP support on Raspbian

Here ’ s a bash script. Put this into a new file, ~/install-nginx-rtmp.sh: execute it like this: Notice it installs nginx from the package…

Remotely viewing Raspberry Pi Cams

If you ’ ve mounted where your Raspberry Pi and camera in a place where you can ’ t plug in a screen and keyboard, you ’ ll want an easy way…

Fixing incorrect Raspberry Pi Cam auto exposure

Are your pictures coming out too bright or dark under reasonable lighting conditions? Check your timeout value (the parameters in . I…

Fuzzing compilers @ JS Tech Talk Night

ever try fuzzing a compiler? ever try generating random programs? transpilers are fun coffeescript lets write JS that you usually can…

May 2015 JS Hack Night

People talked about and hacked Task Runners. Grunt isn ’ t dead even though no releases since 0.4.5 a year ago . Current work is slow and…

307 HTTP status code?

Are you seeing 307 status codes in your network traffic inspector while debugging your site lately and feeling confused? Ask yourself: Have…

using Compass during `grunt build` on Heroku with Strider CD

Long story short: my process requires the ruby gem Compass StriderCD runs my build process on a Heroku dyno with a multi-stack…

rsync files from vagrant box to AWS server

I just transferred a directory full of audio files that I didn ’ t want to check into a project ’ s Git repository with this command: notes…

WordPress to Hexo?

Matias presented a static blog generator called Hexo with some Angular addons to the AngularJS Meetup . I liked what I saw, so I set up…

Bookmarklets & ImageMagick @ Toronto Web Performance Meetup

EventMobi hosted us . A Performance Bookmarklet by @micmro slides and code Check these out: DOM Monster does DOM analysis Perfmap…

NodeJS for Distributed Systems, Webpack, Angular 2 @ JS Meetup

Shopify hosted us Why use nodejs to build distributed systems? by Gord Tanner slides video js was event based from the start…

The Building Things Edition @ CreateInTO

Headless.io by Patrick Schroen ever stream music from your home NAS to speakers in bar via a cellphone-tethered laptop? Patrick Schroen…

WB Lift Monitor with Kibana and ElasticSearch

View source code on GitHub I decided to try loading data from https://secure.whistlerblackcomb.com/ls/lifts.aspx into ElasticSearch , and…

ngToronto Angular Meetup notes – January 2015

Promise-based architecture by Yuri slides think of promises as wrappers around uncertain results promises separate defining a request and…

Javascript in 2015 video

This demo introduces lots of ES6 features while actually building something. I like it! Thoughts ES6 Modules , jspm , and System.js will…

Building APIs with StrongLoop @ NodeJS Meetup

StrongLoop presented their tools for working with REST APIs. Slides are here , and my notes will soon be outdated because the platform is…

Standing desk in a bookcase

Got a bookcase with adjustable shelves? Want to see what using a standing desk feels like? Here ’ s an inexpensive way to try it out. You…

History of timesheets & hourly billing

In the 1800s, Engineer & Manager Frederick Taylor started making detailed records of how long it took employees to manufacture steel in…

Adobe AIR desktop apps, expiring signing certificates, and the developer

Is the app timestamped? Here is the important bit about timestamping from Adobe ’ s ‘ Digitally signing an AIR file ’ documentation When…

10 minutes with Ghost blogging platform: looks promising!

WordPress ’ performance frustrates me sometimes, and Ghost received some good attention a while back. Time to take a look at Ghost! First…

WordPress on Heroku with HHVM

How to Follow https://github.com/xyu/heroku-wp , these instructions work well When generating keys, I substituted with something else…

Docker for Metrics, Sails.js @ NodeJS Meetup

60+ of us met at One Eleven Richmond for 3 presentations and chatting Using Docker for Metrics Dashboards during development Mario from…

Javascript bind vs call

and take same arguments, but do different things. simply allows you to execute a function in a specific scope and returns the result of…

Why to version your composer.lock file

Composer.json often lists dependencies with version numbers that can point to a bunch of potential packages. Lines like this: When is run…

Interview Cake Problem #11

I was on the right track with breaking down the problem. I was ready to start looking for sequences of matching cards across the deck and…

FSTOCO – November 2014 Conference thoughts

The Full Stack Toronto conference had a great vibe and useful talks. 2 weeks later, here are some themes that stick out in my mind: Agile…

How not to die moving from Angular 1.x to 2 + ES6 @ ngToronto Meetup

Shopify hosted ngToronto How not to die moving from Angular 1.x to 2 with Nick and Yuri from Rangle.io J2EE, Rails, Python…

Challenge: Build a HTML/CSS/JS slideshow without libraries/frameworks/docs? OK!

I got most of the way. I needed MDN for checking the usage of: and css transition syntax The hard parts were off-by-1 errors and order of…

Interview Cake Problem #9

I was stuck until the hint suggested swapping values was a legit way to solve the problem. I used JS and Mocha again, and my solution…

Cobi & Taplytics @ BitMaker Labs Group Meetup

Cobi Druxerman from Taplytics presented his company ’ s software and answered questions about startups, products, and A/B testing at…

Shrinking Images @ Toronto Web Performance Meetup

@HenriHelvetica from Forge Media + Design presented “ The Biggest Loser: (Web) Images Edition ” , thoughts and techniques for shrinking…

Interview Cake Problem #8

I signed up for Interview Cake and got my first problem as promised. I first tried to solve it using some function chaining with lodash…

Scripting languages on my mind

It ’ s late 2014. Here ’ s all the scripting languages I ’ ve tried/thought of trying out this year for backend web development. PHP I…

New tool: banner-ad-delivery-cleanup

I got tired of manually copying and pasting banner ad .swf files and backup images from my working directories into a deliverable .zip file…

Evolving a Machine Learning & Analytics Platform in Python @ Full Stack Toronto Meetup

Our stack is a Python back-end with AngularJS for the front-end. We started with a pretty simple Django app using MySQL with scikit-learn…

Building Unbreakable Software @ Toronto AWS Meetup

We met at The Score ‘ s office, and Nate Smith talked about ways to structure AWS-hosted applications for availability and consistency…

Acronyms

I see these over and over again in debates on Hacker News. Time to write ’ m down! ACID Principle 4 letters describing transactions in a…

Upgraded to WordPress 4 and Independent Publisher 1.6

everything still works!

4K monitor thoughts

I stared into a Samsung U28D590D (who names these products?). It was nice, but not mind blowing. Is it for me? Well, none of my current…

Sometimes project maintainers do boring stuff

Taylor Otwell started Laravel , an influential PHP project with a fast growing community. It has its own forum , job bulletin board , and…

Buying fancy ergonomic chairs – new vs used

You ’ ve decided you want that SAYL, Embody, or Zody. Now how much do you want to spend? Lots of people blog about picking up Aerons for…

Continuous Delivery @ Full Stack Toronto Meetup

Nick and Xiyang will discuss continuous delivery on a full-stack JavaScript stack and how today ’ s DevOps and Test-Driven-Development…

Counter balanced sit/stand desks

There are 3 ways of moving height adjustable desks up and down: Hand cranks Electric power Counter balances Hand cranks aren ’ t for lazy…

Google Page Speed, clean front end code @ Toronto Web Performance Meetup

Organized by Barbara Bermes . Hosted at EventMobi . Blake Crosby talked about Google Page Speed. The Insights web application is good…

HumanScale M2 and Ergotron LX Monitor arms

Let’s compare monitor arms! I ’ ve been using a HumanScale M2 for 2 months now, and just purchased an Ergotron LX desk mount arm with a…

Social Product Design Tips from Facebook @ Achievers Tech Talks

Achievers ‘ Social Product Design Tips from Facebook ’ @ achievers.com These are my long lost notes from the presentation. They are…

The Bowling Game Kata in nodejs

I had to ride a train with sketchy internet connection this week, which meant it was finally time to try Bob Martin ’ s Bowling Game Kata…

Chairs for programmers

I need a new chair. My current no-name mesh back chair has these problems: worn out seat no longer provides cushioning reclining lifts my…

Converting a static site from Middleman to Yeoman

This one time I inherited a static website built with Middleman . Middleman has the best of intentions, but I couldn ’ t get it running…

Where to find Global Browser usage statistics

This one time I had to provide guidance on which web browsers to support on a future website. That means I need graphs and things…

Mongo Stuff @ MongoDB meetup

candy.IO Entuit Kevin Cearns talks about what do when things go wrong Diagnostics Each process has its own log, check each log Tools Know…

January 2014 - Toronto MongoDB Meetup

Hosted by Kevin Cearns and Nick Boccone at Bento Miso . Paul Oude-Reimerink and Chad Tindel from MongoDB Inc . Walked through resources…

Unboxing the Wagon – peeking at code

A media buy on the Weather Channel website caught my eye. I want to see what makes http://www.thewagonunboxed.com/ tick. Meta Tags Nice to…

Things I wish I knew about Node + Express before making my first website with it

Develop with nodemon , deploy with forever nodemon vs forever? More like nodemon AND forever! nodemon is live reload for Node apps. When…

Jan 1, 2014 WordPress Attack

Summary A site I monitor saw 1185 requests from 94.138.x.x between Jan 01 05:32:41 & 06:21:09 UTC looking for non existent pages. This site…

NodeJS setup tips for DevOps

These are steps I took to help secure a NodeJS web application and keep socket.io running reliably on Ubuntu 12.04 on an Amazon EC2 server…

How to run composer.phar on Dreamhost

Dreamhost ’ s shared makes running Composer ’ s composer.phar challenging. Here’s I got it to work: Even if your websites are setup to use…

Make localizing apps easier

Here ’ s the steps: Take inventory of text Do an inventory of all your files, and see where text lives. Is it baked into images? Is it…

Things I wish I knew about Android before starting my first Android app

Activities lose state when the screen rotates, but Views don ’ t All those member variables/fields you set while a user interacts with an…

NPM, Vagrant, Linux on Windows, shared directories and –no-bin-links

This is a permissions issue. Linux, running in virtual machine, has tried to make a directory in the Windows file system and been denied…

W3 Total Cache makes blank pages after WordPress upgrade fix

Here ’ s the first fix I always try after W3 Total Cache starts serving blank white pages when I browse my site after updating WordPress…

Installing reddit on a Vagrant Ubuntu 12.04 box

These instructions assume you have some experience with Vagrant and using Ubuntu from the command line. It should take less than 20 minutes…

Policy file for WordPress W3TC and S3-based CDNs

If you are using S3 as a CDN, you will need to give WordPress ’ W3TC plugin access to your AWS account so it can upload files to S3 on…

Fast way to get Android App Screenshots (4.0 and up) off your device's storage

Start AirDroid On your device, press the volume down and power button at the same time to take a screenshot Open and occasionally refresh…

Safari, 3rd party cookies, and Facebook apps

The default settings for the Safari web browser block 3rd party cookies. This means that web apps hosted on https://mysite.com will not…

Laravel 3 Admin Area bundles

Opinions based on spending less than an hour with each bundle: Orchestra Orchestra gives you more framework to build on top of. It has its…

Command line cURL request with JSON

This is useful for testing out REST services that use JSON, like ones made with Restify and MongoDB. This command runs in Linux, OS X, or…

Installing OptiPNG 0.7.3 (or newer) on Ubuntu 12.04

Unfortunately installs an outdated version of OptiPNG (0.6.x). To get the newest version, you ’ ll have to compile from source code. And…

Installing S3FS on Ubuntu 12.04

Check out the source code from SVN Get into the folder created by checking out the code Get these packages (list by Xentek + a few of my…

Basic load testing with Apache Benchmark

Command line:

EC2 + Ubuntu 12.04 + LAMP 2 Server Setup checklist

My steps: Install stuff Add to somewhere in your Apache Config files to enable it Use http://strongpasswordgenerator.com/ to generate…

Laravel Asset Compressor Bundle and filemtime() stat error

This appears to only be a problem with Windows. If you see an error like this while using the asset compressor : know that the code…

US States for Select element in PHP

Need a list like this? Eddie has you covered. Check his US State related PHP snippets . I was able drop that array into Laravel ’ s…

fix FB.getLoginStatus() called before calling FB.init()

To fix this error, I had to take a second look at my code. I had just moved a site to a new server, and started seeing the error in Chrome…

error while loading shared libraries

Just installed ffmpeg on Ubuntu 12 and tried running it only to see this error? ffmpeg is looking in the wrong spot for the library you…

Installing ffmpeg in Ubuntu 12

This is the most straight forward guide I know of: http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/UbuntuCompilationGuide They can be copied and pasted…

Find old bash commands in Linux

Use a wicked one-liner last week, but forget what it was? Search your bash history with grep! If you remember part of the command, you may…

Splitting PHP class files for PSR-0 compliance

Have a ton of classes in one file that need to be split up? Check out Matthew Turland ’ s   class splitter script . Put it in a folder…

List modified files with SVN in Linux

When the command returns too much information, filter the output with . This line finds only modified files and leaves out deleted…

ERROR: Directory ‘/some/path’ exists but failed copying to ‘/some/other/path’

An error like this prevented my Jenkins build from completing. It was not a permissions issue. Jenkins was not configured with a master and…

PEAR connection problems

Having trouble connecting to PEAR channels like , , or ? I frequently see this error: Your ISP may be the problem. Mine (Rogers Cable in…

Recursively deleting .gitignore files in Linux

Download something off GitHub and don ’ t need the included .gitignore files?

400 Bad Request error with C# Google Analytics Helper and Unity

If you find “ 400 Bad Request ” errors in the Unity console while testing out the C# Google Analytics Helper within the Unity IDE, try…

Free Google Analytics for Unity Games

Check out C# Google Analytics Helper at   http://www.persistentrealities.com/code/ Forum thread:   http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/5640…