This is part 2 of a five-part series: Continue reading “Simple Bash Scripts for Lazy People | Part 2: Rails”
Simple Bash Scripts for Lazy People | Part 2: Rails
Posted in productivity, Tools, Unix, Web Development
Category: Web Development
Simple Bash Scripts for Lazy People | Part 3: Other Examples
Posted in productivity, Tools, Unix, Web Development
This is part 3 of a five-part series: Continue reading “Simple Bash Scripts for Lazy People | Part 3: Other Examples”
Writing a Markdown Compiler – Part 3
Posted in Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Web Development
Have you ever wanted to make your own programming language? Maybe a template engine? A JSON parser? If you have ever built any of those, you might have noticed it’s not exactly easy to get started. We’d like to help with that.
Welcome to Part 3, the final in this series on Writing a Markdown Compiler!
Continue reading “Writing a Markdown Compiler – Part 3”
Server-Side Swift: New Hero in Web Town
Posted in All, Mobile Development, Swift, Tools, Web Development
There’s a new hero in the world of web applications, services, and microservices: Server-Side Swift is making serious waves across the industry. At Beezwax, it’s changing how we approach and solve many typical, long-standing coding challenges.
Agile Where You Least Expect It
Posted in Agile, All, Management, Organization Development, Project Management, Web Development
One of the things that I always think about is how linked Agile Methodologies are to Software development. But what concerns me the most is that sometimes it is believed that using Scrum in other contexts is impossible or that it is not even considered.
Large d3.js Application Development
“Code that belongs”.
This is the mantra, the quest, of Beezwax Senior Developer Ryan Simms; which he discusses in this 10-part article on building a large-scale web application using d3.js. It is to write code that fits the context intrinsically. The article focuses on specific techniques with the data visualization library, d3.js. But the lessons are broad: How do you make something fit — in ways that feel like it belongs?
Continue reading “Large d3.js Application Development”FileMaker and PHP 7
Posted in All, Community, FileMaker, Techniques, Web Development
At the Custom Web Publishing (CWP) user group at FileMaker DevCon 2017 in July, a number of speakers (and a big thank you to everyone for a great session!) discussed solutions they’ve taken or investigated for making CWP apps compatible with PHP 7.
At Beezwax, we have a client project with a requirement for PHP 7 compatibility, but many of the available approaches were closed to us due to various constraints, so we came up with this solution.
Writing a Markdown Compiler – Part 2
Posted in All, Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Web Development
Hello, and welcome to the second part of the Writing a Markdown Compiler series! In case you’ve need it, here is Part 1, Intro/Tokenizer and Part 3, Code Generation.
In this part we’ll talk about the second step in compiling: Parsing – also known as Syntactic Analysis. This part has a bit more theory, so it might take some time to digest. Sip some coffee, relax, take yout time, and as long as you don’t rush it you’ll find it’s not hard at all. 🙂
Writing a Markdown Compiler – Part 1
Posted in Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Web Development
Have you ever wanted to make your own programming language? Maybe a template engine? A JSON parser? If you have ever built any of those, you might have noticed it’s not exactly easy to get started. There are a lot of concepts to digest before you get going. That’s why lots of devs just give up. We’d like to help with that.
Writing DSLs: The joy of human consumable APIs
Posted in All, Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Web Development
A well-designed Domain Specific Language (DSL) can help you be more productive as a developer, thus making you, your team and your clients happier. In this post, I’ll guide you through the design and creation of a simple DSL to create EPUB files. We’ll start with a regular API and refactoring until we get to a DSL solution.
Continue reading “Writing DSLs: The joy of human consumable APIs”
Avoid nil-checks. Code confidently. Be happy.
Posted in All, Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Uncategorized, Web Development
This post is about pretty code (with examples in Ruby), plus how to get nil out of the way and be more confident.
Does this code look familiar?
user && user.ask_for_email
Continue reading “Avoid nil-checks. Code confidently. Be happy.”
Introducing ‘Publish To Apple News’ – Open Source WordPress Plugin
Posted in All, Beezwax News, Community, Design, Tools, Web Development, WordPress
We’re thrilled to announce the availability of the Publish To Apple News plugin for WordPress. It’s an open source plugin for the WordPress web platform that enables publishers to push their blog and website content to News, Apple’s all-new app available with iOS 9.
Continue reading “Introducing ‘Publish To Apple News’ – Open Source WordPress Plugin”
What is Dependency Injection
Posted in All, Front-end Development, Ruby on Rails, Software Design, Web Development
If you are a developer, chances are very good that you know what Object-Oriented (OO) code is. You might have also heard about OO Design Patterns, things like single responsibilities, decoupled code, and my subject here: Dependency Injection (DI).
FMAjax and FileMaker Web Viewers
Posted in All, FileMaker, JavaScript, Techniques, Tools & Add-ons, Uncategorized, Web Development
With everything that we’ve learned with our last post, Communicating with a Web Viewer in FileMaker, it makes sense to wrap up the functionality into a FileMaker module and JavaScript library.
Useful Vim Mappings
Posted in All, productivity, Tools, Unix, Vim, Web Development
A few mappings to help boost your Vim workflow.
Rotate through different line numbering settings
Switch between absolute line numbers (normal), relative numbers (based on distance from your cursor) and no numbers at all using CTRL-n:
A Web Developer’s OS
Posted in All, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, Unix, Web Development
What must an Operating System do to satisfy web developers’ needs? This is a tricky question, as each person is a whole different world, so it’s impossible to have a single answer to satisfy every person.
Keep FileMaker Server Web Logs at Fixed Paths
Posted in All, FileMaker, Techniques, Web Development
If you need to scrounge through the web server’s logs in the file system, the way FileMaker Server stores these on Mac OS can be a bit annoying. You end up with a bunch of files named like this:
jQuerySF 2015 – Much more than jQuery…
Posted in All, Design, Front-end Development, JavaScript, Web Development
Attending jQuerySF 2015:
This week I had the pleasure of attending jQuerySF 2015, held in San Francisco, CA.
Despite the name of the conference, the range of web-technology topics included far more than just jQuery.
Never write a render_foo method again
Posted in All, Ruby on Rails, Web Development
[Authored by Ian]
I’ve probably written a hundred render_not_found methods in my life as a Rails dev. Usually they just render a static file under /public, and maybe, if I’m feeling nice, give an XML response. No more!
Setting the Commit Author to Pair Programmers’ Names in Git
Posted in All, Web Development
[Authored by Sam]
In beezwax’s webdev division we generally work in pairs, but our commit logs didn’t used to show this. We wouldn’t bother to reconfigure the git author every time we sat down with a new pair so our git log only recorded one of the programmers’ names. Bryan Helmcamp has a nice script for setting your git commit author in pair programming situations. Here’s another one which works interactively.
Continue reading “Setting the Commit Author to Pair Programmers’ Names in Git”