The Daily Signal (Page 2)

Using WebWorkers

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

Communicating between iframes with window.postMessage

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

Dynamic Table in Vue 2.0

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

Get an array of previous days in using JavaScript's Date API

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

Maze solving with A* visualized

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

Priority Queue in ES6 JavaScript

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

Multipart HTTP requests using the FormData and Fetch APIs

I was recently trying to implement something that had to upload a file along with a JSON object. My initial thought was to just include the file inside the object as a base 64 string. This worked fine for smaller files but broke down with larger ones. Large strings are

Upload files as a gist using JavaScript's fetch API

I've been using fetch for most of my AJAX calls lately. There has been quite a bit of library fragmentation within the JS community with AJAX. Nobody wants to bother with the clunky mess that the original API is and the old gold standard of jQuery continues to be used

Common performance pitfalls in JavaScript

Most people aren't thinking about speed when they are coding in JavaScript. It's most common use case is as the glue between HTML and more complicated user interaction. It's a very pragmatic programming language in that sense. As JavaScript continues to maneuver its way into every programming niche it can,

base 64

Using the FileReader API (base 64 conversion in-browser)

Until recently, I had never needed to read files in on a webpage. Usually, it is more than enough to create an <input> tag with the type of a file and send it on its way to a server to be processed or stored. With the rise of

javascript

Civilization VI Quotes

A new Civilization game launched this weekend and with it comes a list of new quotes. I haven't seen these online anywhere yet, so I thought I'd put them up here. Feature Barrier Reef “Organisms don't think of CO2 as a poison. Plants and organisms that make shells, coral, think

We can rebuild the web: better, stronger, faster than before

If you have written a webpage in the last 20 years, there is a good chance you've written some JavaScript. For most of those 20 years, the core language has pretty much remained the same. The core of the code you wrote for your personal webpage in the 90s wouldn't

javascript

Welcome to treetown! Population: JavaScript

In any computer science education, you'll get the importance of tree data structures hammered into you through books, professors, and midterms. Almost every job interview throws a problem at you where they expect you to use a tree to achieve that coveted Θ(log n) lookup time. Why isn't there

Adding big, beautiful, powerful numbers together in JavaScript

What is the result when you add 10000000000000000 + 1? If you answered 10000000000000001, you are wrong in the world of JavaScript. Why? Long story short, JavaScript uses floating point numbers for everything, which means it loses precision when you are dealing with very large or very small numbers. So, if

Download everything (async wget -i in NodeJS)

One of my most used tools on the command line tools is wget (and it's companion curl). Almost everything you can do on the web can be written as a wget command, which makes it repeatable and scriptable. You also get tons of neat helper functions. One of them in

nodejs

Parsing JSON files with NodeJS

It seems like every month or so, I'm trying to format a large JSON file I've downloaded or dumped from somewhere. Despite JSON being a very human readable, it isn't of much use if it isn't properly formatted. There are plenty of ways to format it in the browser. You

javascript

Hijack AJAX headers with the dev console

A lot of important stuff is passed around in HTTP headers. Things like credentials, auth tokens, and other API information. For the most part, these are invisible to the user. They act as the common glue that binds a session together. I wrote earlier on how to intercept the responses

javascript

Parse the command line with ease using Minimist

Sometimes you come across a tool that is so fit for the job that you don't bother looking for anything else after you use it once. A lot of Unix tools fit this mold. These tools usually have a well defined problem and execute it beautifully. They do one thing

javascript

Reactive Online SHA256 Encoder

Continuing my post series of online tools, here is an SHA256 hash tool. Give it a string, it gives you a big number encoded in hex back. I've also included an MD5 encoder and a hex to decimal decoder as options.

javascript

Reactive Base 64 Encoder & Decoder

Online base 64 encoder/decoders are a dime a dozen online. Just do a search on Google for them and you'll see thousands of them. So many of them are inadequate. It's the current year, you shouldn't have to press a button to encode your string. Note: JavaScript's native atob(

twitter

Follow me on Twitter with this one neat trick

Sure, it's easy enough to follow someone on Twitter. Log into twitter, search for their handle, and click the follow button. That's all well and good, but it is also mundane and boring. If you are tired of boring, here's a super cool way to follow me. Go to TweetDeck

javascript

Turn your cURL commands into runnable JavaScript

I found that recently I've been trying to reproduce a lot of HTTP requests in the scripts I've been writing. I got tired of doing it manually, so I wrote this tool to generate them for me. Not only does this work for when you are transitioning from using curl

sql

Run Oracle SQL with Node.js

I've had to deal with an Oracle database recently, and like most enterprise-level tooling, I've found it lacking. The tools Oracle provides to access their data are the bare minimum they need to be functional. Companies don't buy enterprise software for their developer, they buy it for their operational needs

nodejs

Simple Node.js proxy server with Express and Request

One of the best surprises a developer can get is when "stuff just works". Far too often, you'll get tangled up just trying to get a project off the ground. You'll spend too much time just trying to figure out which config file goes where, which version of

cron

How to run cron on your browser

For anyone that has ever done sysadmin in a Unix environment, cron is an indispensable tool. It gives you a single place where you can schedule jobs and tell them when to run in a simple format (see cron.guru). Thanks to the cron package in NPM, this functionality is