Chris 
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
A good few years back now I made a post on the previous iteration of this site about my problems with Portrait mode in Ubuntu. I still run a similar set of screens, but my triple monitor setup has slightly changed since then. What I will say is that in Ubuntu 22.x onwards (currently just … Read more
Jest is an amazing testing tool, but sometimes it throws up situations that confuse the hell out of me. Even worse is when I get confused by a problem / error message that I am 100% sure I have seen before, and solved, but it was on a different project and I can’t remember how … Read more
This is for my future reference, covering how do I connect a running container in a Kubernetes pod? First, it’s pretty useful to see all the pods in the namespace. Typically someone will have told me the right namespace to use, but if not, I can run: Which gives output like this: As with anything … Read more
I recently had to use Cypress to test a page that had various dropdown options, and some of those options might be excluded if already selected. Being a UK Gov page flow, the user could only select a single option from the drop down, then click continue, and if they wanted to add another they … Read more
If you’re working with Cypress and Jest in the same project, TypeScript may throw errors that the standard Jest assertions are not valid types on the Assertion class. The error I get looks like this: Though in the IDE, even before running the tests, you will likely see something like this: This is a pretty … Read more
If you’re using Cypress with TypeScript in your project, it’s possible you may encounter the following error message when trying to run Cypress: And how this looks in Cypress itself: The issue is fairly easy to resolve. Simply delete all the conflicting configuration files. In my case I wanted to keep cypress.config.ts, and so remove … Read more
Welcome to our journey into the world of code formatting with Prettier for UK Government NodeJS projects. As budding developers, we all know the thrill of bringing our ideas to life through code. Yet, as we dive deeper into the realms of web development, we quickly discover that writing code is just the beginning. Ensuring … Read more
Imagine you send out highly useful emails on a daily basis. Now, imagine, for reasons you don’t want to solve, you have noticed some of the recipients aren’t interested in hearing from you. I mean, why would that be? Who knows. Anyway, regardless I think we can all agree that once you have found an … Read more