GitHub Actions are awesome, right? They’re not perfect — but what tool is? Some 3rd party CICD tools are probably better but they would have to be significantly better to get over the native/3rd party barrier. After thoroughly reviewing features and competitors I don’t think any 3rd party is significantly…

Sauce Labs is an automated web and mobile testing cloud. They take on the difficulty of managing browsers, VMs, devices and emulators and allow you to concentrate on code. The principle reason we moved to Sauce Labs was that we could not easily run Internet Explorer in our test environment…

Mocha by design runs tests in series. Often this is not efficient and you might want to run some or all of the tests in parallel. Mocha uses a wrapper executable under the hood, which runs the “real” _mocha executable. The _mocha executable is run via require('child_process').spawn. See bin/mocha. This…

It may not be VBA anyone but I still stand by my original advice: Excel formulas, the world’s most popular programming language, is now Turing-complete. Go check it out! — Satya Nadella — Microsoft CEO I just got asked a classic question from a friend: “I’m thinking of learning a…

I had a problem. I have been building a data analysis/visualisation app in Node/React for a client and have been sourcing my data from the undocumented/deprecated Yahoo Finance API. It turns out that (surprisingly) the undocumented/deprecated Yahoo Finance API doesn’t provide complete or consistent data for UK stocks (we’re interested…

tl;dr I spent a long time establishing that OS and hardware doesn’t matter. It’s all about whether I can run my code and being productive. Luckily for me, my preferred tech stack runs pretty much consistently across most devices. I believe that Samsung Dex is the best option in the…

technology Quick Rave About CircleCI I’ve just deployed CircleCI for a VetCraft , a client of mine. Continuous Integration and Delivery is always impresses me. It follows our GitHub repository and when we commit to the development branch, it checks out the code, downloads our dependencies ( Composer , NPM…