-
(Apr 1, 2024) The following is a Customer Journey, written in the quickest possible way with nothing but text. It’s the quickest way I can think of right now to get a visual Customer Journey in place and ensure everyone’s on the same page. From text, my script renders a visual representation - and you can use embed the script into your work or your blog as well. Here’s how…
more...
-
(Mar 7, 2024) Cloud-native is quite powerful as there’s hardened components doing much of the work. With this post, I’m bringing together some great services (on AWS) and some great libraries from the open source space to cover the bases needed for a real-live web app.
more...
-
(Mar 4, 2024) The one lesson I’ve learned over two decades and a bit of project work: good briefings = good outcomes, bad briefings = bad outcomes/failure. It’s not the only factor, but a massively important one. As no one wants bad outcomes (take it), it’s surprising how many briefings fall short. Esp. as it can be avoided w/out much mental bandwidth. In this post, I’ve put together “my” template - hoping that it’s useful.
more...
-
(Feb 25, 2024) When it comes to testing visual components, first adivice is: don’t do it - rather test store/actions/reducers/validation methods (i.e. pure functions). But if you really want (or must), here’s a method with VueJS I found the most helpful of several: using Vue test-utils’ querySelector-like API to extract content (this assumes Vue3 with Vite).
more...
-
(Feb 4, 2024) When I first checked out AI coding assistants about two years ago, I was less than impressed, to say the least. Why automate stuff that is less than 10% of your day and is largely muscle memory anyway? Having used CodeWhisperer for some personal stuff recently, I gotta say I’m really impressed after all. The option+C in VSCode really is super-helpful, esp. in contexts where frameworks differ, change or just evolve quickly. The machine can read and copy faster than I ever could - and that’s what makes it quite handy.
more...
-
(Feb 4, 2024) Starting from scratch is educational - but not efficient. Copying and pasting a great template is superb already - until you have to update every project. Tools like projen (newest kid of many in the block) solve the issue by being able to start from a template - and updating from it as well. That allows more experienced devs / hands-on architects (is there any other kind?) to help projects get off the ground quickly. Especially when there’s many similar projects. This post explores some specifics and details of how do do it.
more...
-
(Feb 3, 2024) I have yet to meet someone who’s like “cool, finally doing documentation!” or “at last I can track my hours, fun time!”. It’s just unnatural, (unnecessarily) complex, taking a ton of mental bandwidth, argh. At the same time, a solution done and well-document in the past may help down the line. If only writing it down was fast and easy. Same goes for hours - no invoice without them. Recently, I came across Obsidian and started using it a bit for my own stuff. And it looks like this program has a nice approach for both issues - making documenting easier and also making reporting hours and stuff easier. This post digs into some details.
more...
-
(Nov 12, 2023) Guess there is no contest that testing needs to happen. Which is easier said than done: unit tests don’t cover the complexity of interplay between components - while acceptance tests are flaky. Still: the user needs to see sth so we need higher-level acceptance (and integration) tests. Not knowing when loading is complete is a major problem - and this proposes another (still rough) idea on how to deal with that.
more...
-
(Nov 12, 2023) Took me a bit to write this up - but here we are: event driven is just business as usual in backend. And it makes a ton of sense in frontend, too. Especially, when the UI consists of several components, pot. even from several builds. Sounds a lot like Kafka and several stream processors - a pattern that is successful for a reason. So time to do the same in the frontend.
more...
-
(Feb 8, 2020) Most ‘default’ database UIs are OK(-ish) but not really exciting or really nice to work with. And even with a Frontend-focus it’s important to understand data at hand to present it right. Strange behavior, memory hunger, no history of commands or post-processing of results almost made me write sth on my own (I have a Frontend focus, after all) - however: there’s help already available. Sth with an enormous and committed community: R and RStudio. So here’s how to tackle typical database tasks in RStudio - with history / recall, saving queries, and a lot more…
more...
-
(Sep 22, 2018) Webpack is a great tool for getting an application out of the door - and optimize the way code gets packaged and transported to users’ browsers (like minimum size, combining many small downloads into one by inlining, eliminating dead code by Tree Shaking, etc.). However, one can go beyond optimizing the own delivery using Content Delivery Networks (CDN) like CDNJS to download commonly used libraries (like React or jQuery) from there instead of packing them into the own delivery. This has a couple of advantages:
more...
-
(Jul 1, 2018) Tables don’t look good on small screens - at least not per se. Conventional wisdom has it that rows should be converted to tiles stacked above one another. This does indeed very often solve it nicely - at least as long as reading column-wise (like comparing values along a column) is not desired. This post looks at some ways of getting better here.
more...
-
(Apr 14, 2018) Scrolling the table contents and having a sticky header is like the eternal problem in Web development. Setting a max-height plus overflow-y to tbody won’t cut it. Using a table component library of some sorts is not a joyful solution either. However, there is hope: with just a tiny bit of JS, one get get quite far.
more...
-
(Mar 24, 2018) There’s situations where it makes sense to overlay two (seemingly unrelated) pieces of information in one plot (a.k.a. diagram/chart). There’s reasons not to do it (or at least apply caution) but anyways: this post describes how to just do it and how it compares to alternatives.
more...
-
(Feb 4, 2018) This is like an evergreen topic that crossed my way so many times in one form or the other that I decided to just do a brief writeup on it, for whatever it’s worth: Spreadsheets are cool because they’re empowering - they give everyone the chance to create. And it’s quick to just to JFDI-implement them.
more...
-
(Oct 28, 2017) The Test-drive of Shiny with CouchDB involuntarily showed a lot that’s not possible (at least not easily). So this post focuses on Shiny once more - this time playing more of the strengths of the framework (i.e. displaying insights). I take the data from gRasping the sentiment, which is a matrix dfDimM of how often which sentiment appears in which song (showing the first two lines):
more...
-
(Oct 14, 2017) The idea of Rapid Application Development is not exactly new. And, as I see it, many attempts have turned out rather annoying (much worse than having to develop more myself: necessary hooks for code to tweak the remaining 10% are just missing every time. And all the cluttered code…).
more...
-
(Sep 29, 2017) Mental Floss provided the inspiration with a post on counties with half the U.S. population. Spoiler: it’s not that many - esp. compared to mainland U.S. overall. I sat down on some fridays to find out whether one can draw a similar map for Germany (and whether it’s that extreme).
more...
-
(Sep 22, 2017) React (the browser-version) supports both HTML and SVG. I sat down (TGIF) to find out how far SVG (only) can take me to do visualizations that look ok and are animated in some (helpful) way. Turns out it’s not that hard after all. Here’s how do create a pie chart…
more...
-
(Sep 4, 2017) TGIF project using popular songs
more...