I was working on a large Aurelia project and having trouble with clashing names of JS classes. The convention for Aurelia View Models is that their class names end in CustomElement. But to prevent clashes, I wanted to ensure that View Models attached to routes ended in Route and components in Component (e.g. an EmailRoute might contain a EmailComponent). I didn’t find a built-in way to instruct the Aurelia loader to interpret class names this way, but it turned out to be pretty easy to make an override:

If a page has complicated forms, you may want to ask the user to confirm when they try to navigate away while there are still unsaved changes. Applying this decorator to Aurelia route View Models does that for you.

This custom attribute for Aurelia can be used to easily add event listeners to any element and send custom data to Google Analytics.

These TypeScript method decorators make lazy loading easy by ensuring that certain (async) functions are always called before others.

This TypeScript property decorator makes sure that values assigned to that property are converted to the right type, provided you can do so in a predictable manner.

Here is a TypeScript method decorator used to queue calls to a number of async methods that work on shared state and need to be called one at a time to prevent race-conditions.

TypeScript property decorators are applied when a class is loaded, not when a new instance of the class is created. Here is a technique you can use to alter properties using decorators so that they still appear like unique, own properties of every instance of your class.

I’ve been working with Protractor a lot in recent monts, writing automated tests for the web UI of our company’s customer portal. In this post, I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way, and give some practical advice.

Protractor makes it very easy to locate a specific element in your webapp for testing by writing CSS selectors. However, by using this overmuch, you’re locking your integration tests to the current structure of your app, making the tests fragile. Here’s a more robust alternative.

Recently I found myself in need of a custom matcher for my Jasmine-based unit tests. I looked around and only found a few some outdated examples, so I wrote my own. Here it is so you don't have to do the same.

Say you have a couple of files that you want to serve for a while, and you happen to have Node installed on your box. Here’s three easy steps to serve the contents of a directory using Express.

I used to think accessibility meant outdated government guidelines and ugly designs. But when I dove into it, accessibility turned out to be a fascinating topic and a fun, challenging part of design and development.

Here is a very simple library of pollers written in TypeScript. It uses async / await so if you want to transpile it to ES3 or ES5 you’ll need TypeScript 2.1 or higher.

I love the solarized color scheme, specifically Solarized Dark. When I set up this blog I wanted code snippets displayed the way they are in my editor: Solarized. Styling the highlighted stuff embedded in the post itself was easy: others had already written the CSS. Based on this, here’s what I used to style embedded gists on this blog.

A decorator for KeyboardEvent listeners which filters out events from keys you're not interested in.

Here are some notes on the topic of accessibility that I took while researching the subject from the perspective of a developer.

I found myself in the position of building a lightweight i18n mechanism for the frontend of an enterprise app recently. I implemented a couple of decorators that inject translations into properties. I also extended the Gulp build process to gather all translation keys into a single file for me, which I could then use on the backend to deliver only the required translations, rather than send over the entire dictionary. Here’s how.

I love Promises, and I love that they’re becoming a core Javascript feature. However, the standard implementation doesn’t let you query the state or fate of a promise, which in some cases may be necessary.

The Glassfish Java application server comes with a number of tools, including pkg. Unfortunately, pkg is a 32 bit Python application and almost all of us run 64 bit systems. So you need a couple of compatibility libraries to run the tool. Here’s how you do that on Ubuntu 16.04.

To set up this blog, I wrote a snippet of Jekyll template code (Liquid) to create social share links. You can find it on Github if you’re interested.

In which I demonstrate two shell aliases that every office-worker absolutely must have in order to function.

In which I try out three JavaScript frameworks to see which is best suited for building individual frontend widgets.

I've released a very simple webapp that has some checklists I find useful. I started it off with a checklist to go through before committing code.

While working on my little checklist app I needed a way to hard-wrap text entered into a <textarea> and preserve the linebreaks when copy-pasting it somewhere else. HTML and CSS don’t support this, so I wrote some vanille JavaScript code to insert the linebreaks, trying to break on words whenever possible.

In this article I will demonstrate a setup using Docker, docker-gen and nginx that will add new Docker containers to nginx automatically as an upstream instruction, but still let you manually configure how these containers are publicly served by writing the site instructions yourself.

Deploying a new mysql server using Docker is quite easy. But once the server is up, you want root access to it from your command-line. Here's a little shell function that'll do it for you.

I happened to come across this fine article today: “What Technology Should My Startup Use?” by Matt Aimonetti.

I have a number of frameworks, platforms and reference projects in my workspace that I want to update daily. Rather than going to each of them and doing svn up or git pull by hand, I’ve written a little Bash script to do it for me. I just keep a list of all projects I want updated. Now I need only run ./up.sh once a day.

Here are two Bash scripts I wrote some years ago that allow you to send your computer to sleep for a specified time and then wake up automatically. They work with the rtcwake and pm-suspend tools.

I wrote this PHP class some time ago. I've used it in a number of tools I've written in PHP. It gives you a simple yet versatile templating mechanism.

Docker is a platform that allows you to deploy any kind of app in a uniform way. Dokku builds on this to create a full PaaS. It allows you to simply push your code repository to your server and let Dokku build and deploy it for you, automatically.

I’ve posted about how to set up shipyard on your local machine. You can also use your local shipyard to manage your remote servers, but to do this you have to set up a secure connection to the Docker daemon on your server. Docker has an article which tells you how to do this. Since I’ve had to do it a couple of times over the last few days, I figured I’d make a bash script for the process.

Note: this tutorial is outdated. Check shipyard-project.com for the latest installation instructions.

Here's how you get the latest version of Docker on Ubuntu.