Being inspired by my colleague Jon Q videos for building a Gutenberg Component. I wanted to try my own, just focused on building the story part for Storybook. Q’s videos are great, they go deep into the thinking and details for designing components and a large component design system. My screencast is just short and […]
Category: Code
Working with Vim
A set of vim tips and features I use often, the goal is to help you improve your fluency with vim. I initially titled this post “Intermediate Vim” but experiences vary and non-linear, so what may be intermediate for some is basic or advanced for others. A basic understanding of vim is a prerequisite, I […]
My Debugging Process
Here is the process I go through when trying to debug a tricky coding problem. First, I run a private personal blog which I use for debugging and taking coding notes. You can consider this your coding journal, and whatever tool works for you. I find something digital works better, since you can use HTML […]
Ubuntu Guide for Mac Converts
Here are some tips and tricks to help Mac users adjust to Ubuntu and Linux. I was a die hard Mac user ever since OS X was released in 2001. The combination of a Unix core and real desktop apps was a perfect match for desktop and development. However times change, with Apple’s focus on […]
Beyond Ad Blocking
Ad blockers are one way to make the internet a slightly nicer place. However, more can be done, especially when it comes to helping yourself from making bad decisions, like reading the comments. First, you need a browser extension which allows you to run your own CSS. The most popular is probably Stylish which has […]
Unix is my IDE
An integrated development environment (IDE) such as PHPStorm, Eclipse or Netbeans provides a set of tools and integrations available together to make development easier. Common features are: Text Editor Project search and replace Automatic building, testing, linting Source control integration The command-line meets all of these features. Editor First, my text editor is vim. I […]
Git Snippets
Undo If you made a commit and did not push and want to change, use reset it will unstage the commit and your repo will be at the state prior to the commit. You can use reset with a hash or ~ back from head. If you want to completely undo the previous commit, backing […]
IP Address
It is possible to represent an IPv4 address in different formats than the common x.x.x.x notation. An IPv4 address is simply a 32-bit number, or a 4-byte number with each section representing a byte. For example using my mkaz.com IP address: 45.79.78.169 Converting each part to binary: Decimal Binary Hex 45 00101101 2D 79 01001111 […]
Code Signing a Windows application
Today, we released our WordPress.com Desktop app on Windows, the app takes advantage of all the work put in creating the Calypso app which is the Javascript client code that powers WordPress.com, which is all open source. To build the desktop apps, we use Electron which bundles Javascript, Node and the Chromium browser together into […]
Testing Clients to an HTTP API in Go
An example on how to test a client which calls out to an external API, without requiring the API server to be up and running. From Testing Techniques video by Andrew Gerrand at Google I/O 2014. Go has a standard library net/http/httptest which you can use to create a test HTTP server, similar to Go’s […]
Python Argparse Cookbook
I use Python as my go to tool for command-line scripts. So I find myself often parsing command-line arguments for these script. Since I use various programming languages I don’t remember anything, so I’m constantly looking at documentation and sadly, Python docs are a bit challenging to read. So, so similar to my Python String […]
Lanyon, a markdown web server
I’ve just released a new bit of software I’ve been developing. Lanyon is a simple web server, which reads directories of markdown files and converts them to HTML and serves. An intuitive and easy way to create a website. It is open source and available on Github at github.com/mkaz/lanyon Lanyon was derived from my static […]