I hate magic things. In programming, I mean. I try to avoid magic strings and magic numbers as much as possible because I can barely remember the thing I typed five seconds ago, let alone something that you have to maybe type five hours from now. So, I tend to use a lot of enums … [Read more…]
D3.js is a super cool and very powerful library for creating some really interesting visualizations. One of the problems that I ran into recently was regarding the “this” keyword in D3 functions. For example, in regular old javascript you would do: Which is fine. “this” is scoped to the function, so it would point back … [Read more…]
Recently I had several small arrays in Javascript that I wanted to combine into one array. It would be easy enough to write a function to accept two arrays, push the values from one into the other, and return the resulting array, but ECMAScript 6 introduced the spread operator (<—a lot more examples in this … [Read more…]
Regular expressions are powerful, but I find that they’re also incredibly annoying to use. Recently I was trying to create a parser that would try a few different regular expressions and output an object with the proper fields defined. The input was a string separated by periods, so it was fairly easy to create the … [Read more…]
When you write code against an Observable, you subscribe to the result. In the subscribe method you provide the callbacks to perform when the Observable is called back. That means you can execute different code for success and failure. In the last post I wrote about how to mock up and test Observable<T> in Jasmine … [Read more…]
Say that you created a service that essentially wraps Angular’s HttpClient calls: And say that you called that in a component: And now you want to test the Get function to make sure that myValue is set to the value returned by the service. If you try to create a spy on the function in … [Read more…]
Ludum Dare is an over-the-weekend video game creation competition that happens three times per year in April, August, and December. Ludum Dare is latin for “To give a game.” There is no prize for winning – you simply get bragging rights. The competition is to foster creativity and encourage people to make a game. Potential … [Read more…]