Chris 
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
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