Chris 
This post follows on from Advent of Code 2023: Day 1 Part 1 – Calibrating Snow Operations where we were busy solving the Advent of Code 2023 Day 1 exercises using Kotlin and TDD. Part 1 is solved, but as soon as you provide the answer, Part 2 becomes available. Mean. The problem is similar, … Read more
I’ve never yet taken part in the Advent of Code, and judging by how much time it took me to solve both parts of Day 1, it’s debatable as to whether I will have completed all challenges by Christmas Eve. But it’s an excuse to test out my rather rudimentary Kotlin skills, and share what … Read more
I was reviewing some TypeScript code this afternoon that had a type assertion (as) (also commonly called a ‘cast’) in there that could have been avoided by using a Type Guard. Type Guards are one of my favourite features of TypeScript. That makes me sound like a real nerd. But hey, I might convince you … Read more
A really simple one today, but one I had need of, and wasn’t sure was possible. That is to take a cURL request and import it in to Postman. The clue is in italics above. However, I didn’t know this feature existed, and judging by the replies I got internally on Slack, neither did anyone … Read more
You know the drill: leave the office for the day on Wednesday, everything works. Open the laptop Thursday morning, errors everywhere. No? It can’t just be me… surely. Well, today’s issue was when I ran my Jest tests, all of a sudden I started to see this: And this kinda tells you what is wrong. … Read more
I wanted to cover off a way I’ve been using Azure AppInsights in a NodeJS / Express application recently. But when I shared the post with a fellow developer for review, the feedback was that they had no idea what Azure Application Insights is, or how they might use it. That got me to creating … Read more
In a bid to save you time, I’m going to give you the conclusion I came to after spending several hours both at work, and after work, researching this issue. Do not export enum … from .d.ts files. Enums are runtime values and putting them inside .d.ts files means they will very likely be ignored … Read more
Of all the hooks available in React, useReducer is easily my favourite. It’s nice to be able to solve simple problems with useState, but in component’s with even a smaller amount of complexity than can be solved with a boolean state value, I tend to favour useReducer. Let’s dig in, see some examples, and find … Read more
Imagine you have a list of text, maybe from a spreadsheet, and you need to convert that from plain text into a quoted and comma separated version that could be used in a JavaScript or TypeScript array. How can you achieve that? Well, in this post we will cover three quick ways. Let’s start off … Read more
Last night I clicked the update button when prompted to switch from Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy (I think!) to Ubuntu 23.04 Lunar. I say I think because I’m not entirely sure what version I was on before. Possibly I’d updated to 22.10… but it doesn’t matter. The fun comes in when I hit that update, but … Read more
