Latest 5 Posts

1. Why Is TypeScript Picking Up Old Types? October 2024

   At Campfire Learning we have a large TypeScript monorepo containing all the code for our various services as well as our various frontend applications that we use to deliver our curriculum and assessment experiences.

   While working on a new backend component, I installed the 1.0 version of the Cheerio XML parser to handle HTML and XML parsing. As I worked in a new package in the repository, I noticed that I was getting errors when trying to initialize a Cheerio 1.0 parser through its load() method:

2. Everyone Wants A Blog, Nobody Wants To Blog July 2024

   It's been more than a decade since I wrote a blog post on this site.

   I told one of my new coworkers about my desire to restart my blog, and he hit me with the quote featured in this blog entry's title:

   Everyone wants a blog, nobody wants to blog.

3. Combining Tasks with Grunt May 2014

   I was recently asked to help out with a few build steps for a Drupal project using Grunt as its build system. The project's Gruntfile.js has a drush:make task that utilizes the grunt-drush package to run Drush make. This task in included in a file under the tasks directory in the main repository.

4. Avoiding Flat Tires in Your Web Application June 2013

   This Monday, the CitiBike bike share launched in New York City. The website was beautiful and responsive, and more than 15,000 registrations were processed through it before the launch happened.

   But then, a funny thing happened. The website and the mobile apps' maps started coming up blank, and they stayed blank for more than 12 hours. What follows should not be characterized as a failing of the technical team. Launches are tough, and I don't mean to pile on what was obviously a tough situation. Instead, I would like to look at a few choices that were made and how the system might have been better architected for scalability.

5. Testing Drupal with Ghosts and Gherkins at DrupalCampNJ February 2013

   This weekend marked the second annual DrupalCamp New Jersey at beautiful Princeton University.

   I was happy to fill in when a presenter dropped out and presented a session called "Testing Drupal with Ghosts and Gherkins". In this presentation, I talked about how both CasperJS or Behat could be brought to bear to test a Drupal application and gave some demos of each. The slides are embedded below.

35 more posts can be found in the archive.