Bret Lowrey

I recently thought of an interesting experiment. If I wanted to find out where users were clicking on a website, how would I go about it? It's trivial if it is a static webpage and the only clickable objects were new pages. You can just look at the server access

It's really great to have promises be part of the standard library in ES6 JavaScript. I've been using them as a part of my scripts long before the ES6 spec was finalized. I was won over as soon as I saw how simple they could be compared to callbacks. I

One of the more bemoaned aspects of using JavaScript is that the entire state of the program is added to a global scope. In browsers, this is accessed with as the window object. While other languages have tightly enforced rules about which subroutines can access what data, in JavaScript you

Most webpages these days are a lot more interesting than in the early days of the internet. Instead of just being a blob of text, websites will now phone home to get new content or take input from a user. You can open your developer console and switch to the

I found myself with an interesting problem when I was trying to reverse engineer the data structure of an object. I knew the ID was somewhere in this huge object but it was obstruficated. I didn't want to expand every property just to find out where this ID resided. I

It's easy to encode numbers to string in JavaScript. It had native base 64 encoding and decoding (atob and btoa respectively) for a long time. One kind of encoding that has become increasingly popular on the web is base 62. While not as efficient, due to the loss of two

Sometimes you just need to load a script on the fly. Whether you are dropping down into a console or embedding your script in a place where you have no guarantee what libraries will be available, it can be an inescapable requirement. Since the import syntax is not part of

Security is a huge issue for web services. With everything including your toaster getting an REST API lately, there are a lot of attack vectors for hackers that never were possible before. One way to provide a reasonable amount of security is to protect your services with HTTP built in

One of the cooler and lesser used algorithms I learn in my time at my university was the Levenstshtein distance algorithm. You see it in action almost every time you use search and you get suggested results back. A lot of time, these suggestions are just coming from the backend,

It's rare, but sometimes you need two independent elements to scroll at the same time. It's not a hard problem to solve using the DOM. Just bind the scroll event of one element to the other and update the scrollLeft (or scrollUp for vertical) property of the other. The Angular

As a follow up to my earlier entry on how to write a combination function in JavaScript, here is my function for permutations. One thing I noticed while exploring the ES6 generator API is how useful for... of loops are. You can get by using while loops, as they are

It can be useful to grab every character in order from the alphabet when you are coding sometimes. For example, if you wanted to display a ordinal list by letters, like a mulitple choice test. Some languages give this to you out of the box (Perl, Ruby) but JavaScript is

One thing I find I need from time to time in any programming language are combinations and permutations of lists. Some languages like python include it in their standard library, but most of the time, I find it useful to keep an implementation handy I can reference. Here is mine

I recently installed a Let's Encrypt certificate on this site. I was surprised by how easy it was. Besides a few changes to my nginx configuration, most of the process, including the certificate generation was scripted. One thing remained once I had a certified HTTPS site. I had to redirect

I was looking into writing something that needs to look for each word in the English language in JavaScript and ran into the issue of where to get this data. If I was using a scripting language outside the browser this wouldn't have been a problem. I could have simply

Now that I've been exploring the functional programming style in ES6, one of the things I've found missing from the standard library is some sort of range function. You see it a lot in functional languages like Clojure or scripting languages like Python where there isn't a classic C-style loop

There are a lot of libraries out there that parse CSV files for pretty much any language out there. JavaScript is no exception. When I was looking for one that was utilized ES6, I was hard pressed to find one. Since it is a fairly easy task, I decided to

Before ES6 was fully implemented in browser and had spotty transpiling, Lodash was my "go to" utility library. While it is nice to have a lot of the functionality now natively available, there are still a lot of functions that I would use on a regular basis I'm

If you want to treat JavaScript as a functional language, an important thing to design you functions for is immutability. Some functional languages like Haskell and Clojure enforce this by making it part of the design of the language. However, JavaScript was designed in a multi-paradigm way. A useful tool

I was reading up a bit on Lambda Calculus today and I came across the concept of Church Numerals. It has been since my university days since I had come across them, but they captured my interest once more. The idea that you can describe something as fundamental as natural

One of the quickest ways to give style to a webpage is to use a full screen image as its background. It can be done with a surprising little bit of CSS. This code will fill the entire background with a centered and scaled image that doesn't cause scrolling and

I was developing in an Angular 2 project that uses webpack, and I was getting an odd error after webpack had finished making its bundle and began the [default] Checking started in a separate process... phase. I was getting hundreds of lines that looked like this: [default] /home/user/project/