Introduction

Last week I painted a bird’s eye view of ….Vue and how it might compare to React. To catch up click on over to Part 1. This week I wanted to jump into Vue directives so you can get an glimpse of the rendering syntax differences between .vue components and React’s .jsx

Vue Directives

Directives are special attributes with the v- prefix. Directive attribute values are expected to be a single JavaScript expression (with the exception of v-for, which will be discussed later). A directive’s job is to reactively apply side effects to the DOM when the value of its expression changes…

1. Introduction
2. Basic Overview
3. Single-file components

Introduction

I recently was part of an interview process for a company that builds their front end applications almost entirely with VueJS. Coming from a primarily vanilla JavaScript and React background, naturally I was very curious. Having my potential boss suggest that:

“You should look into Vue — and that’s not an assignment or anything.”

— Maybe Future Boss

It was a great excuse to dive into the documentation, check out some of my favorite tutorial producers and build my own front end Vue app. Rather than try to reinvent the wheel and get bogged down…

Introduction

I’m working on a HUD (heads up display) for the apartment that will have important items like: the current weather, 7-day forecast, and plant care notes for all of our house plants. This React app sits on top of a Ruby on Rails RESTful API will eventually end up being accessed from a tablet that’s displayed prominently on an important wall that runs off a local Raspberry Pi server.

Sure, I could buy a Google Home, Amazon Alexa Thing-y, or Apple WhatEver, but where’s the fun in that?

The Epoch

For the weather portion of my app I’m using OpenWeather’s free OneCall…

Introduction

This is part of an accidental series on a small Node.js app I’ve built to keep me abreast of Philadelphia Department of Streets’ trash/recycling collections status. Like many things this past year, trash/recycling collections have been pretty wonky in the city due to the pandemic and the sudden onslaught of winter 2021 storms dumping mounds of snow and ice in our region.

Why set out my trash on Friday if it’s not going to be picked up til Wednesday or even next Friday? This little Node.js app is an attempt to alleviate that and keep my trash from blowing all…

Update: Twitter Developer Advocate, Andy Piper, reached out to let me know they fixed this issue. I’m keeping this article as demonstration of how to problem solve when you’re in a pickle. Also how cool is that to get a reach out?!?! Thanks, Andy!

What I’m Building

It should come to no surprise to anyone who has been alive for the past ten months in the U.S. that things are …different, unexpected, and dare I say: unprecedented. Due to COVID and the sudden shift for millions to work-from-home, or worse yet, surprise-you’re-unemployed, has created a monumental uptick in residential trash output. …

Introduction

Recently I was tinkering with a React app to control my Philips Hue smart LED lights that we have around the house. I wanted to play around with something low stakes that I want to eventually host on a local touchscreen-connected Raspberry Pi that’s always on and maybe even wall-mount it!

If you don’t know, the Philips Hue smart light ecosystem exposes a REST-ish API to your local network where you can query general settings, status, schedules and config via GET requests and then making changes with PUT requests. …

Overview

1. What the heck is UUID?
2. Why would I want to use a UUID?
3. Rails Setup
4. DatabaseSetup
5. The Big Reveal!
6. Epilogue

1. What the heck is UUID?

A universally unique identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit number used to identify information in computer systems…While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is close enough to zero to be negligible. — Wikipedia

Here’s an example:

2. Why would I want to use a UUID?

Bad actors: and no, I don’t mean Steven Seagal and his perma-sunglasses face.

As a performing artist I had always been drawn to and needed music. As time went on music production became more and more integrated with and facilitated by technology and computers. Before long I was making my own sounds, songs and video with entry-level digital audio workstations and video editors like GarageBand and iMovie. This gave way to Final Cut Pro and Ableton Live. Ableton Live led to performing my music out in the world in unique and increasingly spontaneous ways with the adoption of USB MIDI controllers and wearables. …