Wednesday, January 4, 2017

SASS - Handy Mixin to Handle Your Margins and Paddings

How many times have you found yourself in need to remove margin or a padding on your HTML element or to add extra 5 or 10 pixels to it?  I do that quite often, and if you are anything like me, you'll won't feel like you've done a good job if you just inline the style:

Monday, November 14, 2016

Basic integration of Angular 2 project generated via Angular-CLI with NodeJS

Angular 2 is an amazing platform, and Angular-CLI is a fantastic way to start an Angular 2 project. Generating a project via Angular-CLI gives you a client-side code. This code needs to be served up from the server and a lot of people seem to question how exactly this should be done. I see this question pops up often so I decided to write a quick post about wiring the output that angular-CLI generates with NodeJS. In particular, this example shows how to wire things up with the ExpressJS server.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Runninng Docker Commands via Gulp

There is a saying: "Laziness is the mother of all bad habits." However, for us--programmers--I find another saying to be true more often: "Laziness is the driver of all progress."

While working on a couple projects, which I'll blog about separately in posts to come, I found myself executing the same Docker commands over and over again. Being a lazy programmer I decided to automate it, which led to the birth of a new library: docker-cmd-js.


Intro: Beyond the Bits and Bolts 

First, let me take a step back and talk about why I started using Docker in the first place.

The nature of the project I'm currently working on requires a lot of integration tests. These tests run against different databases (relational and nosql, different versions). The amount of databases that I'd need to test against could be rather large. Installing all these databases locally would be painful. Besides I'd have to maintain the databases state for the tests to run properly. With Docker I could start up a virtual machine with any amount of containers with any databases I need and test against these.