Bret Lowrey

Most programming languages today have great JSON support. If it isn't built into the language, there is a de facto standard library you can add to your project. Included in these libraries is a formatting function. For the sake of space, most of these libraries will have your JSON minified

I was coding in a C# project when I came across a class that was mapping names to GUIDs. Since GUIDs are objects, you can't simply put them in a const array or an enum like you can do with simpler data types. public static class Guids { public static readonly

If you need to create HTML, it is usually a bad idea to just concatenate strings together. It tends to create brittle and invalid documents once there is any level of complexity to it. You need to manage the position of each tag and when to close it, where to

This blog is running Ghost, a relatively new blogging platform developed with NodeJS. It seemed like a perfect match for this website when I was first starting off because I only needed something lightweight and easy to manage. I also appreciated it being in JavaScript, the main language I use

After writing my latest post on scraping text from Amazon's web Kindle reader, I got an idea. I wondered how hard it would be to scrape an entire book with the method. Here's what I came up with: function hashString(str){ let hash = 0; for (let i = 0; i <

I recently bought an e-book on Amazon. It had been a while since I had last done it, so I was surprised to see they had an online viewer for the book at https://read.amazon.com/. I had wanted this years ago. Most e-book formats are more or less

I recently needed a simple way to keep track of if I had seen a particular string before. A naive way to approach this would have been simply to keep an array of all strings I had seen in an array and then do a ".includes(string)" on

I recently came across a well designed add-on to upload files with Angular called angular-file-upload. It's highly customizable, takes full advantage of the HTML 5 file drag and drop, progress, and size API, and was easy to use. I wrote a basic example of it and put it up on

Creating PDFs is a deceptively simple problem. It seems like a well defined problem. It's a ubiquitous format and they are static. We use PDFs every day and know how they should look and behave. When you look underneath the covers, PDF as a format is fairly complicated. This is

When I was trying to resize some SVG images to better fit onto a PDF, I thought it would be as simple as resizing a <img> tag: simply to change the width and height of element and it would adaptively respond. SVGs work differently than that. Since they

While researching some cryptography methods, I stumbled upon Knuth's multiplicative hash method. I was surprised how well it worked for how simple it is. It's not perfect but it is good enough for a lot of things you would need a hash for. The main principal behind it is that

I recently came across a problem where I needed to iterate through a JavaScript object and apply an operation to another object with the same structure. The best way I've found to iterate through objects is by keeping track of references to child objects. This means any operations you want

One of the most promising developments in CSS recently has been the flexbox display option. Ever since bootstrap hit the scene, grid layout platforms have all but superseded the old ways of designing page layouts. We've come a long way since the dark ages of table layouts. Flexbox allows you

It's fairly easy to test if a string contains any alphanumeric characters with regular expressions. However, they aren't functions. They can't be passed as arguments to map, filter, reduce, and can't be composed. Here's some simple functions that can be used in those cases.

If you've ever dug into more complex usage of mkdir on any Unix flavor, you've probably used the -p option before. It allows you to create a deep path with only one command. Say you wanted to make a directory at /tmp/1/2/3/ but none of those folders

One thing commonly seen as a limitation of JavaScript is the lack of a decent parallelization paradigm. Given the humble beginnings of the language, it is no surprise that one of the more complex aspects of language design was left out. JavaScript opted for a simpler event-loop based scheduling. It

Since the late-90s, extensively using iframes has been maligned by webdesingers. Used in the improper way, they make it very hard to save application state, are often ignored by search engines, and open up security issues. It also used to be the case that all kinds of hacking had to

I've been hearing a lot of good things lately about the Vue framework. A work with Angular on a daily basis, so the prospect of a more performant, stripped down version of Angular 1 sounded pretty good to me on paper. And since I've tried my hand at with almost

I was recently implementing a calendar component on a UI and it required an array of dates to initialize it. I wanted to show the last 90 days. MomentJS has some neat utility libraries built on it that I have used before that would have fit the bill. However, I

I've been interested in getting into AI a little bit more, since I rarely get a chance to do it in my day job. One of the most fundamental algorithms in AI is the A* algorithm. It's very similar to other shortest distance algorithms. It uses a directed graph and

I recently found myself trying to find a shortest path between two points in JavaScript. The approach I took was similar to Dijkstra's algorithm. A key component to the algorithm is the priority queue used to determine which edge should be evaluated next in the main loop. In Python, the