Blog Archive

• Set Postgres System Timezone

  October 20, 2020
  A quick guide on how to set Postgres system timezone in a way that works across restarts originally appearing on Magistrate's blog.

• Storing Timezones in Postgres

  October 1, 2020
  A quick tip on storing a user's timezone in Postgres using build-in utilities originally appearing on Magistrate's blog.

• Case-Insensitive Text Columns in Postgres with citext

  August 15, 2020
  A dive into Postgres' citext extension originally appearing on Magistrate's blog.

• Gravatars and Postgres 12 using Generated Columns

  July 8, 2020
  A quick look at an interesting use case for generated columns in Postgres originally appearing on Magistrate's blog.

• Knex and Postgres

  July 2, 2020
  An introduction to using Knex.js and Postgres originally appearing on Magistrate's blog.

• JavaScript Styling with Feeling

  May 11, 2018

  This is a quick introduction to how I did CSS-in-JS on a recent project using Emotion and Preact.

• Slimmer Code Reviews with Husky

  March 15, 2018

  Husky is a simple tool for configuring Git hooks in a project. It really shines when you need to easily configure Git hooks for a project across a team. That is what we are going to do today.

• Virtualized Rendering in React

  November 27, 2017

  Virtual rendering (also known as virtualized rendering, windowing, and a number of other terms) is a method of only rendering the elements that need to be rendered to the DOM.

• Use Fetch

  November 30, 2016

  How do you make an HTTP request in JavaScript? Do you pull in jQuery? Write your own XMLHttpRequest? There's a better way.

• Deep Objects in Lodash

  October 17, 2016

  A quick introduction to two Lodash methods I found recently, _.get and _.set, to help work with deeply nested objects.

• A Simple Build Process for React and JSX

  June 28, 2016

  Unfortunately, build processes are a big part of JavaScript development. Build processes do not have to be complicated, despite what you may have heard. Let's jump in with my default for building React and JSX projects. I say "default" because if the project gets complicated I will move to using Gulp. An example of a more complicated project is one with multiple entry points.

• Testing React Components with Enzyme

  March 28, 2016

  We finally boarded the React train and it is great. I looked at Enzyme and Jest. Enzyme seems a lot easier to use so I chose it. I am impressed with how it turned out.

• Nebraska JS Conference 2015

  August 27, 2015

  NebraskaJS Conf is a conference I had the pleasure of attending recently. It was held at the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo, named the #1 Zoo in the World by TripAdvisor.

• Global npm Install without Sudo

  January 26, 2015

  You should not have install global node modules with root! The default for directory global node modules is usually /usr/local/ when installing from the npmjs.com binary. This directory is not writable by users (as intended). I would like to preface this with I have only done this on a OS X. The instructions should be the same for Linux. Sorry Windows users, I can't help here.

• What You Might Not Know about Chrome DevTools

  June 18, 2014

  Part One? Chrome's DevTools is a magical and mysterious beast. We can conquer this beast together! Josh Bavari recently gave a Lightning Talk on JS debugging. You should check it out. He is a great presenter.

• Quick Tip: Don't use Star (and not for the reason you think)

  May 24, 2014

  So, here at WDT we do a lot of the JavaScripts and the CSSes. We had an issue in two of our weather mapping applications where users could not type in text boxes in using Safari. We tried to ignore this bug until yesterday when Jordan, our resident code wizard, found the cause of this issue.

• Quick Tip: Useful Npm Package Listing

  May 7, 2014

  We've all had to suffer through npm ls and it's endless trees of dependencies but there is a better way!

• Browserify: Rockin' the Wizard Hat

  April 15, 2014

  Jordan Rousseau recently gave a presentation at OKC.JS about Browserify. Jordan is the fearless leader of the web team, of which I happen to be a member, at Weather Decision Technologies.

• Quick Tip: npm CLI Shorthands

  April 9, 2014

  If you're like me, you spend a lot of time daily using npm, the official node package manager. Typing npm install whatever-package --save or npm install whatever-package --save-dev is very tedious.

• Star Dates in JavaScript

  December 29, 2013

  While on my winter vacation, I began creating problems to solve out of boredom and to keep my JavaScript skills sharp. One evening, after an unknown amount of whiskey, I decided to look into converting dates into Stardates. TREKKIE ALERT! Don’t let this discourage you from reading. There still is a decent amount of information JavaScript Dates that can be extracted from this article.

• 200OK Conference Wrap Up

  October 7, 2013

  200OK, Oklahoma's premier web dev conference, took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma on September 27th 2013. I had the pleasure of attending and I would like to share my experiences. It was an excellent conference, with a rock star (yeah I said it!) lineup of speakers. This was the first time (that I can remember) going to Tulsa. I live about two hours away.