Installing Rails from scratch using Docker

I really enjoy programming in Ruby, and my preferred web framework has been Ruby on Rails for many years. But, setting up to work on a new project is one of my least favourite yaks to shave. Over the years, web development has become more complicated, and a new Ruby on Rails project can involve: …

The Complete Tutorial on the Top 5 Ways to Query your Relational Database in JavaScript – Part 2

This article was originally written for devspotlight Welcome back! In the first part of this series, we looked at a very "low-level" way to interact with a relational database by sending it raw SQL strings and retrieving the results. We created a very simple express application that we can use as an example, and deployed …

HTML converter for Bootstrap forms

This is based on an idea from the Indiehackers forum. When I create a web form using a framework like Bootstrap, it's a bit tedious to craft the HTML that the framework wants. For instance, if the plain HTML were like this: <label>Email</label> <input id="email" type="email" placeholder="foo@bar.com" /> The equivalent HTML that Bootstrap needs is …

Adding SASS to an ES6 (ES2015) Javascript Project

This is a follow-up to an earlier blog post about setting up an ES6 project from scratch, using Webpack. I would recommend reading that post first, before diving into this one. In this post, I'm going to demonstrate how to switch to using Sass instead of writing plain CSS to manage the styles for your …

Checking Bitcoin balances

Stellar are giving away some of their cryptocurrency, Lumens, to anyone who owns Bitcoin. To get the Stellar, you need to prove you own the Bitcoin by providing your Bitcoin address(es) and then signing a message to prove you control that address. I’ve used a lot of addresses, over time, so figuring out which of these addresses I need …

AWS Lambda + HTTP + Terraform

I’ve been meaning to play around with AWS Lambda for a while. When I saw this post I finally got around to trying it. It’s a great post, but I prefer automation to pointing and clicking a web GUI. So, I decided to try to create a similar setup using Terraform I’m using this tutorial, but recreating it using terraform. The …

A Simple ES6 (ES2015) Javascript Project (webpack edition)

This is a version of another post I wrote in 2016, but using webpack instead of gulp In this post, I’m going to walk through creating a very simple Javascript project. The project itself is not going to do anything much, but the point (as always, with javascript) is to figure out how to get the build pipeline set up …

Scripting Pivotal Tracker

We’ve been using Ticket Poker for a while, in my current team, and we’re pretty happy with it. Now, after each planning session, I take the stories we create in Pivotal Tracker, use a command-line script to generate a Ticket Poker ticket for each one, then paste its URL back into the Pivotal story. Pivotal Track Story That gets a bit repetitive, so I …

Ticket Poker API

Someone asked me about integrating Ticket Poker with Jira. I don’t use Jira, but it got me thinking. I want to minimise the amount of work required to get everyone to estimate a ticket, and I want to enable people to integrate Ticket Pokerinto other planning tools. So I’ve added a very simple API to Ticket Poker. Here’s how …

Ticket Poker

I wrote a little web application to help teams estimate tickets (aka stories) during sprint planning. In my current team, some people are often working remotely, so estimating is tricky. Slack or other chat tools are great, but if you estimate that way, people see each others’ estimates as soon as they type them, so …