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Using Tags in your OpenAPI Spec
26 February 2019
Read moreWorking with OpenAPI is bringing so many possibilities to the way that developers work with APIs, it's exciting! The spec is very comprehensive though and I've found myself answering questions on individual aspects of it recently, so I thought I'd capture one or two of those things here. Today: tags.
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Windows removed my grub menu
28 January 2019
Read moreI know this will happen to me again at a bad moment so I'm putting it here on my blog and hoping I can find it in my future hour of need ...
My work machine is a Windows PC, with dual boot to the Ubuntu partition that I actually use …
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Ready-to-wear API Collections with OpenAPI and Postman
08 January 2019
Read moreHave you noticed that API providers are starting to offer "descriptions" of their APIs? These are usually OpenAPI specifications, computer-readable documents that describe every aspect of an API's endpoints. They can be used to generate documentation, SDKs, but now they can also be used for my favourite API-related activity: poking around! Postman just added a feature to allow importing OpenAPIs and I love it.
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Test Web Requests with a Local RequestBin
14 December 2018
Read moreI've been a long-time fan of RequestBin, but it's no longer active since it suffered so much bad traffic. It's never been too difficult to set up locally and when I tried to do that last week, I realised it has got even easier because it now has a docker-compose configuration.
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Are you Creating, Curating or Consuming?
06 December 2018
Read moreI've been thinking lately about my own interactions online, especially around content. There are three main ways that I work with content: creating, curating and consuming. Each has their own place but I'll start by outlining each one.
Creating content is all about putting your own creations out for others to share. I've had this blog longer than I care to discuss and certainly since before microblogging was really a thing. It's much lower investment to throw out a quick tweet about something and in lots of cases it's a more appropriate medium
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How NOT to Review a Pull Request
22 October 2018
Read moreExamine the diff and comment on it, a line at a time
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Muffet: quick and easy link checking
05 September 2018
Read moreIn my not-so-new job I work on Nexmo's developer portal and that means a lot of documents, a lot of links, just a lot to keep track of! One thing I worry about is changing something and breaking links from somewhere else, so I wanted to be able to check for existing links, broken links, and to include internal links like http://example.com/home#something as well since all our titles are linkable in that way.
Enter: muffet
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Vim settings for working with YAML
15 August 2018
Read moreHaving managed to avoid YAML until quite recently, my vim installation wasn't well set up at all for working with it. It needs more config settings than plugins, so I thought I'd write down what I found helpful. I'm using it quite a lot now I'm working with OAS (used to be Swagger) API definitions.
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Using Config Files with Ngrok
13 August 2018
Read moreI'm a huge fan of Ngrok, a tool to create a secure tunnel to your laptop. It is brilliant for testing, well, anything running locally really. Someone asked me about my setup recently and I'm using a couple of config files to keep things quick and consistent, so I thought I'd share here what I shared with them.
You can use a central config file for ngrok, and/or specific config files for each project. I use both, so I'll show you around my setup.
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Kitchen Island Project
14 July 2018
Read moreWe built our first "big" project (well, since the play kitchen a few years ago) since moving to this house nearly a year ago: a new kitchen island! I used to blog a lot about the house and crafts and things, then I got better known for code things and got stagefright and stopped ... but I love this stuff and I'll blog it if I want to :)
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Presenting from PDF
09 July 2018
Read moreI've been using PDF as a file format for presentations for the last ~8 years and I LOVE it. The clue is in the name: Portable Document Format: it's an open standard, and works everywhere. You can embed your fonts, images, whatever ... if you end up presenting it from another machine for some reason, everything is going work, even when you want to upload the slides afterwards. Yet, it's still a pretty unusual choice, I think because people don't know much about the tooling around it - so I thought I'd share some of my tips.
Today: tools for actually delivering a PDF presentation (I make them with rst2pdf ).
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React to Database Changes with OpenWhisk Actions
23 April 2018
Read moreOne of the best features of CouchDB is its change feed which allows us to get a feed of the changes happening on our database. It's also possible to have a serverless function (examples are for IBM Cloud Functions but should also work for Apache OpenWhisk) that fires in response to activity on that change feed. I have a database of events that I want to react to when they happen, but the change feed doesn't include the actual document that was added - but you can add one of the built-in functions to a sequence to make that happen. This post will show how to achieve this by wiring up a built-in action to fetch the document with another action of our own that then handles the data.