Richard Kotze

Agile software engineering

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Install Bcrypt in Docker image and exclude host node_modules

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This post will be covering two topics, installing Bcrypt NodeJS as a dependency and prevent linking node_modules from host machine to your docker container.

Using Bcrypt package to encrypt passwords comes with a minor challenge: when installed it needs to be compiled to the operating system (OS) architecture using node-gyp, python 2.x. These prerequisite dependencies are needed to build the app on a dev machine, which needs to be documented. However, docker solves the need to communicate this in your “get started” documentation. Unfortunately this will create a problem of slow feedback loop during development.

Connecting to GitHub with OpenSSH on Windows

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Here are the steps to setup OpenSSH with Git to connect to a repository on GitHub.

I use Windows as my main OS and Cmder as my console emulator. Installing the full version you will get Git for Windows which has loads of Unix commands available in your PATH including OpenSSH. The version of Cmder I’m using is 1.3.0.

Git and Putty on Windows in command line

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I’ve moved away from using a Git GUI to command line, I typically used GitExtensions. The reason being, it’s a little slow having to open any GUI to make a commit and push. It is quicker to use the command line and a side benefit you learn more about how Git works.

Useful JavaScript snippets

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I have picked a few useful features of JavaScript which you might find helpful and I will explain how to use them.

Mobile website or responsive design

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How do you go about choosing whether to develop a mobile site or responsive website? I would say its depends on what you are trying to achieve and with all the hype over responsive design you might sway in favour of that. In this post I discuss some benefits and negatives about both options which hopefully will help you come to a better decision.

Integrate LESS with MVC bundling

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Less is an excellent tool for any developer to help mange CSS code. SASS is also a great tool that does a similar job but this post is  focused on LESS and bundling it with your ASP.NET MVC web application.

MVC 4 bundling CSS and JS files

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MVC 4 provides an excellent tool to help with optimising your web application called bundling. The idea of bundling is quite simple, you tend to have multiple CSS and JavaScript files which can be rolled up into one CSS and JS file. The contents of the files is also minified to reduce the individual file size. It might seem odd at first to bundle all your files into one but the idea is to reduce the number of http calls made, because a web browser can only handle two - four http requests at a time. If you have a lot of request to different files this can make your web app appear slow.

How to change the hostname on Amazon Linux machine

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To change the hostname of a machine you can use the following command: “hostname mynewhostname”. - With out the quotes. Worth noting is this does not affect the DNS and this is only for the current session. By rebooting the server, this information will reset to whatever Amazon machine is configured to.

How to open file dialogue just using JavaScript

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Say for instance that you want to open the file select dialogue for a user to select an file to upload. Like a photo, pdf or any other file type. However, you don’t want to use the standard file input HTML element, instead use a styled link or button to show the file window.

Using GIT FTP and GIT Python

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GIT is an excellent version control system with its GUI GIT Extensions. Something I was thinking about was finding a way to push only the project file changes to the live server. Ideally being able to choose a committed version to push live, or roll back too. There are ways like bundling the project into a .zip or .tar file and deploying it.