Tag Archives: tips

12 Nov
2020

Ubuntu Command for Mic Mute with Pulsemixer

One of the major problems I run into with video conferencing tools is how many of them are not at all accessible. I’m a keyboard-only user so if I need to hover a pointer in a particular area of the screen and then click an icon to mute … then I can’t do that. And if you mute me when I join because there are a lot of people here, then I can’t participate at all. To work around this, I need a one-liner to mute (and unmute) my mic … so here it is. Continue reading →
21 Oct
2020

Combine Multiple Field Tags in Go

I work a lot with JSON APIs in my Go projects, so almost every struct has some field tags on it to translate AccountID into account_id and that sort of thing. Then one day I needed to load data from config using mapstructure and it took a few attempts with the search engine to find the syntax I needed, so it’s here for next time I need it (or in case you need it too). Continue reading →
23 Jul
2020

Using Environments in Postman

I’m using Postman more lately and showing off the Environments feature really often. I really like this feature for giving easy ways to handle values I use frequently, but it seems to be a bit of a hidden gem, so I thought I’d write about when I find it useful, in case you do too! Continue reading →
25 Jun
2020

Accessing Nested Config with Viper

I’m writing a Go application that glues together a bunch of other things, so it has a whole bunch of basically unrelated config, dumped in a yaml file. I was struggling a little with this non-standard use of Viper but actually, it does everything I needed. And, presumaby, more besides. I thought I would put some examples here to show how to handle this. Continue reading →
15 Mar
2020

Remove Accidental Content from Git Commit

When I teach git I try to show loads of good practice about how to inspect what’s staged before commit, etc etc. Good practice is good of course, but knowing how to undo a mess you created is better – and mistakes will happen. For example, accidentally including a node_modules directory in your otherwise excellent and useful commit. This post will walk you through how to fix the problem without losing any of your work. Continue reading →
16 Dec
2019

Counting Duplicate Commit Messages

When chatting about source control good practice the other day, I got a question about repeated git commit messages. In general, I would always advise that the same commit messages appearing multiple times in a project’s history is a definite red flag – and if I’m responsible for that repository I will probably make fun of you for doing it. Continue reading →
14 Dec
2018

Test Web Requests with a Local RequestBin

I’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. Continue reading →
15 Oct
2018

Managing Environment Variables in PHP

Now I work with more programming languages, I start to miss features from other languages when I come “home” to PHP. One that I hadn’t seen in PHP before I saw it in other languages such as NodeJS (I think Ruby had the original implementation) was: a way to easily control setting your environment variables, particularly in development. In NodeJS the dotenv library is great for this; handily in PHP vlucas has already created phpdotenv so we are all set to apply these tricks to PHP applications! Continue reading →
02 Jan
2018

Copying CouchDB Data Between Laptops

I’m a regular and happy user of Apache CouchDB, so much so in fact that I’m writing a library to talk to it from PHP. While working on tweaking a feature, I realised that the laptop I use for development didn’t have the right/enough data on it to test this particular thing – but that I had a suitable database on my other laptop. Copying data between CouchDB installations is very easy because it has an HTTP API, but usually when I do this at least one endpoint is web-accessible. Enter one of my favourite tools: ngrok.

Ngrok allows me to make the CouchDB on one machine visible to the world (with all the security caveats that this entails! It’s a random URL, never leave the tunnel open longer than you need it, etc) with a command like this:

ngrok http 5984

This opens a tunnel to my local machine on port 5984 which is CouchDB’s default port. I’m running a local dev instance that doesn’t need a username or password which makes this simpler if not exactly secure. I get a gobbledeegook ngrok URL that will allow anyone, anywhere to talk to my CouchDB.

Then I went ahead and on the other laptop, used the web interface to start replication from the sample products database on the local machine over to the one on the ngrok URL.

As soon as it starts, the first laptop shows that there’s traffic coming over the ngrok link – and a few minutes later I had the database I wanted and can go ahead and work on this feature.