React SSR Deep(ish) look

Today, I looked into the React SSR sample code. (Kudos to Dan and team for the sophisticated user-land experience, btw). What stroke my curiosity was the <!DOCTYPE html> token at the start of the server response HTML payload: Why was I curious, you ask? Cuz at no point in the codebase do we explicitly write […]

how to assert that your custom hook didn’t throw

This micro blog entry is for those who: use renderHook from @testing-library/react-hooks to test their own custom hooks want to assert that the custom hook did not throw So, by instinct, one probably would do sth along this line: The reason why the above approach doesn’t work is quite obvious, if you think about it. […]

TypeScript Node.js testing tips

Situation 1 Use mocha in server-side TypeScript projects with compilerOptions.paths in tsconfig.json ? Then we need: mocha tsconfig-paths ts-node { “ts-node”: { “files”: true } } in the tsconfig.json file (see more here) Depending on how we import our modules around in the codebase, point (4) above may not always be needed. In one of […]

checkout another branch from a git repo that was cloned with –single-branch before

So you had a super large git repo, and you only wanted to checkout a single branch (e.g. to potentially save some disk space). You probably have gone with: Now that you’re done with that branch, you want to checkout another branch for your next task. Not having “the entire history”, git will yell sth […]

GIT_SSH_COMMAND

I have a number of git repos on remote systems (e.g. GitLab) where my laptop’s pub key is already registered for a certain other account not associated with the aforementioned git repos. Thus, I usually have to GIT_SSH_COMMAND=’ssh -i <path/to/some/private/key>’ git <command> so as to communicate with these repos under the correct identity. I might […]

adding deno completions on Mac Catalina

So, on Deno going 1.0, I decided to give it a try today. The getting-started doc explains clearly that we can use deno completions <shell> to generate completions definition for deno. But being new to zsh (the default shell on Mac Catalina), I didn’t know where best to install this completions definition to. So I […]

minimal TypeScript project setup

In this post, I’d love to discuss a setup that’s minimal enough for me to start a TypeScript-based project.

How to stop / end / abort / cancel a request made by npm request module

Hello guys, just a small update. Recently I took over a project developed months ago by another team. It was a NodeJS codebase with a lot of dependencies, one of which was the npm request module. As a feature required us to stop the request midway (if some condition has been met), we realised we knew nothing about stopping […]

Serving static HTML sites quickly with http-server

With the advance of contemporary front-end philosophies and frameworks such as React and Angular and all, having a quick and painless way to get started with any HTML project (even preferably configuration-less) can be very rewarding at times.

Homebrew install “permission denied” issue

Just a very quick reminder to the future me and anyone running into the same problem. If you somehow got the “permission denied” issue when doing any sort of “brew install”, it is much likely because your /Library/Caches/Homebrew/ is owned by a different user. You can do a sudo chown -R `whoami` /Library/Caches/Homebrew/ and it […]