I have been working I18n localization. It has caused me to need to generate large list of messages in JSON, YAML and Java properties. So I got creative and made this little app to generate them. I call it Message Writer.

Well it was a long cold winter and I have been in deep with the JavaScript. Now that spring is here, I am booting up with some good old Java Rest because I would like to do some more backend development now. I've done backend work here and there through out my career, but really need to to do more Java. 

So I put together a simple REST API in Spring Boot with authentication that could be used to start any project. I like JWT personally over other methods I have used in the past. This simple api lets you register, login and create and edit post articles. I set it up with the database with Docker for easy installation.

At work, I was faced with the challenge of upgrading an AngularJS app with heavy use of $compile to the latest version of Angular which has no out of the box solution for compiling a template string that includes other components. So after much research I developed this component. Of course, I forked the main concept from another developer's sample posted overstack (https://stackoverflow.com/a/53739133) and I added the context input. It was hard to find on the internet, so I hope that others will benefit from this code. Enjoy.
https://mx-bind-html-compile.stackblitz.io

Virtualization has been a big part of my business for the 15 or so years. I used Virtual Box pretty heavily for my development environment. A few years ago, this thing called Docker emerged and I heard a lot of good things about it but I never got around to trying it as Virtual Box worked pretty well and taking the time to setup up a new environment with a foreign tool was just not on my priority list. Then a few weeks ago, I installed it and poked around with it and found that it was pretty easy to setup compared to a virtual box image. Surprisingly, I can run a single command and spin up a fresh ubuntu image or just a MySQL container. I have only just gotten started, but I am pretty impressed with the ease of this new tool. 

With this simple command, I can create and Ubuntu image with my desktop mounted inside of it.

docker run -t -i -v ~/Desktop:/Desktop ubuntu /bin/bash

Inside the container:

apt install [anything]

exit

Find the id of the container just created:

docker ps -a

Save a new image from the container:

docker commit [container id] [new or existing image name]

Now run the container by name you just committed to confirm your changes.

Have you ever wanted to create end to end tests for your app, but just can't find the time to get those tests working. Well, I have tried several frameworks from Cypress, to Selenium. I have always felt like this technology ought to be made simple. Just recently after taking another look at Selenium, I found the IDE to be very easy to use in order to quickly create scripts that could be improved by hand later. Here is a very simple example.

First I installed the Chrome Selenium extension.

https://docs.seleniumhq.org/selenium-ide/

I created a simple test using the record button and exported it as a Python test.

Then I installed the Python Webdriver using 

 
apt-get -y install python3.6
apt-get -y install python3-pip
pip3 selenium

Next I installed the chromedriver and I used NPM

 
npm install chromedriver

Now make sure you have Chrome installed. I used Headless on my server.

I may have added source first

 
apt-get -y install google-chrome-stable

Then I ran the following script with this command.

I had some free time last Saturday, so I decided to play with d3.format() and created an AngularJS number filter for formatting numbers in common formats you might see on a website or application. This is what I came up with.

Just to be fair, I decided to make a React as well as an Angular 6 version too.