Blog Posts

Elixir is a really powerful functional language for web development, and the community have built a plugin for all the Jetbrains products so you can build using their powerful IDEs. Here’s how to set up Elixir in IntelliJ:

It’s no secret - importing in Python is A Hard Thing. I’ve suffered and done the hard work so you don’t have to.

Adding Google Maps to your Vue.js app doesn’t necessarily require plugins or even the Vue CLI. Today we’ll look at how to create a super-lightweight Vue.js app which uses the Google Maps API.

Whilst SQL syntax is largely consistent between platforms, there’s enough quirks in the different dialects to trip you up. I’ve been immersed in SQL Server for the best part of a decade and only just started to branch out to PostgreSQL and MySQL. In SQL Server, working with dates is relatively straightforward, particularly when setting a date column to default to the current date and time if no value is given:

The React Router is a powerful tool for creating targeted React components for specific routes, mimicking traditional server-rendered views but giving you all the power of dynamic DOM manipulation. We’ll be focusing today on how to pass props to components that require authentication to be rendered.

Alpas is an awesome web framework dedicated to the Kotlin language. It feels more like Ruby on Rails or Django and offers more productivity for those not familiar with the Java ecosystem. Let’s get an Alpas app deployed to Heroku!

The beauty of Kotlin lies in its ability to give you the security of a statically typed language whilst also the syntax flexibility of dynamically typed languages like Ruby. Here we cover the ability to utilise collections of different data types but still have the ability to process them as we would expect to.

You may have played around with Java in the JetBrains IntelliJ IDE environment. If so you may have come across JetBrains’ own language Kotlin, an expressive language which leverages all the power of running a statically typed language on the JVM (compatible with all the Java libraries to boot), but with a lot of the expressive features we’ve come to know and love about languages like Ruby and Javascript. Let’s set up a Kotlin project in IntelliJ and start doing some TDD!

In our apps we need to create dynamic queries to our databases to allow our users to interact with the data they see. Whether this is to sign up as a new user, update their existing details or maybe order something new.

Most of us have been here before: where you are building something (in my case a Sinatra app) and you get some kind of error such as the following:

So a coding student of mine asked me the other day a deceptively simple question: “I have an HTML file, how do I just get it to show in the browser?” Many of us are so used to kicking off applications within frameworks with commands like rails s or npm start that actually rendering some HTML becomes relatively obscure. Here we’ll cover a few handy ways to do this.

Querying SQL directly to pull out data can be incredibly powerful, particularly when dealing with aggregated data. If the data has more than one dimension, the standard with SQL is to stack the dimensions into rows, which may be handy from a way to handle raw data but becomes harder when we want to display the data in a more intuitive tabular manner. Enter the pivot!

Coming from a data background, I am very used to viewing and handling data in highly structured tables - and languages such as Python and R have dataframes which simulate this structure by way of dataframes which allow for very quick navigation and data manipulation. When looking at other popular languages things get a bit tricky though as tabular- style data structures aren’t as common. Even less so in Ruby - so what have we got?

Ever had that moment when someone asks you a deceptively simple question which, the more you think about it, gets harder and harder to answer? So I had that last night with this seemingly innocuous bit of code in my Rails app:

I had been using Minitests for unit testing for a while but decided for a small project to see if I could level up my unit testing skills. RSpec provides some really nice syntax which helps to write tests with really clear purposes:

CSS classes can be really powerful when utilised well - however I came across this problem when trying to put together this blog - let’s say I have the following link I want to share so I wrap it appropriately:

Microsoft VS Code is best known in the developer community as a light-weight code editor. However it’s features don’t stop at just web development - with its wide library of extensions and selection of terminals it may just be one of the most flexible tools for data science too.

Jekyll is an awesome static site generator that makes it easy to get up and running with a personal website or a blog. This blog has just been built with it! While you can slog it out with your own CSS to style it, integrating Bootstrap allows you to leverage the power of a framework to build responsive, good-looking site with minimal effort. So let’s get started!