I recently attempted to scrape a website for assets in order to recreate the site as a personal coding exercise. I tried to do this with wget, flagging particular file suffixes like jpeg, gif, png in order to download the images I needed for this project. …

This is a quick post that covers the important but easy-to-miss detail of your React app’s browser tab. By default it will look like the following: Small overlooked details like this can adversely affect the overall impression of a website. Fortunately, this is an easy fix. First, locate the default…

If you have ever been tasked with cleaning up capitalization or filtering for special characters in strings, chances are you have encountered regular expressions. If you dove into the documentation it probably wasn’t long before you were greeted with mind-melting expressions that looked like this: /[\w.%+]+@[\w.-]+\.[a-zA-Z]{2,10}/ Because regular expressions allow…

Rails was designed with a focus on making the work of a developer easier. One of the ways it accomplishes this is by providing tools to automate core, commonly-used functionality. Generators encapsulate this idea, building out models, migrations, routes, and other assets by taking some parameters and quickly implementing our…

If you are looking to add another layer of immersion to your game or web site, sound is a great place to start. There are several ways to accomplish this, so I’ll walk you through your options starting with my favorite: let mySound = new Audio('my_audio_file.wav') mySound.play() The simplest way…

In transitioning from Ruby to Vanilla Javascript, one of the most disorienting bits of syntax I encountered came in the form of arrow functions. The =>s peppering the JS files I initially encountered had no equivalent in Ruby, although they function similarly to Lambdas in other languages like Python. The…

This post is all about the whimsical, imaginative language that undergirds what at first glance appears to be cold, utilitarian code. Before we get to splats and kebabs, however, I should quickly share how I came to be delivered on the doorstep of such unexpected irreverence. .shift-ing expectations When I first began…