Chris 
In this post I will show you a way to create a unit tested React component that allows you to pass either a plain string, or one or more <p>text goes here</p> tags, and then render out only the first X words. When the word limit is hit, a ‘Show More’ button will display, and … Read more
Today’s error is likely going to make you want to kick yourself. I certainly felt like quite a wally after realising my mistake. But I do like to blog these as I hope that by doing so, I shame myself into remembering the solution in the future. OK, the error message: It doesn’t massively impact … Read more
How can you see the logs from a Pod that crashed in Kubernetes? That was the question I needed to answer when I took a look the output from watching the running Pods in my namespace: From the above I could see that several of the pods had been regularly restarting. That was unexpected. The … Read more
Recently I’ve started on the Java track over at Exercism. As practically a complete beginner to Java, I am still finding my way around the tooling, and in particular, IntelliJ IDE. As part of the Annalyn’s Infiltration exercise I was provided with 30 failing jUnit tests, where each of the tests is tagged like so: … Read more
Today I needed to resize a ton of stock photos in various sizes so that the result was each image was at most 800 pixels in width, but I wanted to maintain the aspect ratio. What I mean is that if the original image was 8256 x 5504 pixels (where that is width x height), … Read more
If you’re using TypeScript with Express, you may well hit on TS2339: Property ‘whatever’ does not exist on type ‘RequestQuery’. It’s actually pretty easy to solve. Perhaps more frustrating than anything, as you may well have lots of examples of this problem, especially if migrating an older project from JavaScript, or less restrictive TypeScript, to … Read more
For reasons that currently escape me, I started using Docker for smbd a while back. I’m not sure if it’s the case by default, but my installation of Ubuntu has samba running as soon as the machine starts up. This conflicts with the Docker container implementation, and as the local samba starts before Docker, that … Read more
Here’s a fun one I wouldn’t have spotted for quite a while longer, had I not smashed my phone last weekend. Long story short, I dropped my Google Pixel 6 shattering the screen, and decided to switch to iPhone for the first time… ever. Related to the RangeError problem in the title, but not to … Read more
The following is my solution to the Micro Blog code puzzle in the Java track on Exercism.org. Exercism Readme Here’s the Readme contents for the Micro Blog code puzzle: Instructions You have identified a gap in the social media market for very very short posts. Now that Twitter allows 280 character posts, people wanting quick social media … Read more
This morning I needed to do a deploy to production on a Kubernetes cluster. One of the useful commands is seeing the output of a kubectl get pods -n {some namespace}, which is one way to get a summary of the pods being transitioned between old and new. The “problem”, as such, is that the … Read more
