web development

Adobe Color CC – Color Schemes Tool

If you are not a graphics or web designer by trade, but do have an occasional need for a color scheme that just works, Adobe Color CC is the tool just for you. It’s web-based – so there is no need to install anything, it’s free, and it’s super easy to use. It supports a variety of color rules – analogous, monochromatic, triad, complimentary, compound, and shades – just pick one, and drag the markers around the color circle, until you are happy.

I’ve seen and used a bunch of similar tools, but I think this one works the best of them all.

Deploying with git

Git is an excellent version control, but it’s more than just that. A lot of people use it to deploy their projects as well. Most suggestions (for example, this tutorial from Digital Ocean) around the web employ the post-commit (or other) hooks to push the code to a remote server. While this works well, I prefer to do it differently. I like the pull model better, where the deployment is triggered outside of git, and relies on git to fetch the code updates and run some sort of a build script, which handles database schema changes, cache resets, filesystem permissions, etc. Such approach also allows to limit remote access to the servers (especially the production ones), and separate responsibilities of a developer and a deployer.

With the many pull, merge, fetch, and update options that git provides, it is sometimes difficult to choose what’s the right set of commands to use. I’ve figured it out via a rather lengthy trial-and-error process. But if you don’t want to go through all the pain of that, here’s a nice blog post that tells you exactly how to do that. I’m copy-pasting the commands here just for the future reference.

cd "${DEPLOY_TREE}"
git fetch --all
git checkout --force "${TARGET}"
# Following two lines only required if you use submodules
git submodule sync
git submodule update --init --recursive
# Follow with actual deployment steps (run fabric/capistrano/make/etc)

And I suggest you read the full article for the explanation of why this is a better way and what are some of the issues with other strategies.

OpenAPI Specification

OpenAPI Specification v2.0 – formerly known as Swagger RESTful API Documentation Specification.

Swagger™ is a project used to describe and document RESTful APIs.

The Swagger specification defines a set of files required to describe such an API. These files can then be used by the Swagger-UI project to display the API and Swagger-Codegen to generate clients in various languages. Additional utilities can also take advantage of the resulting files, such as testing tools.

JavaScript debugging tips

I came across this blog post which provides some very handy tips for debugging JavaScript in the browser. My favorite top three are:

Display an object in a table format for an easier view

var animals = [
   { animal: ‘Horse’, name: ‘Henry’, age: 43 },
   { animal: ‘Dog’, name: ‘Fred’, age: 13 },
   { animal: ‘Cat’, name: ‘Frodo’, age: 18 }
];
 
console.table(animals);

with this output:

Unminify code as an easy way to debug JavaScript

Custom console log messages

console.todo = function(msg) {
	console.log(‘ % c % s % s % s‘, ‘color: yellow; background - color: black;’, ‘–‘, msg, ‘–‘);
}
 
console.important = function(msg) {
	console.log(‘ % c % s % s % s’, ‘color: brown; font - weight: bold; text - decoration: underline;’, ‘–‘, msg, ‘–‘);
}
 
console.todo(“This is something that’ s need to be fixed”);
console.important(‘This is an important message’);

for this result:

Very handy stuff!

Bitbucket Pipelines Beta announced

BitBucket blog announces Pipelines Beta (coincidentally after I’ve spent about a week playing with Jenkins). These guys are dropping their Bamboo Cloud CI solution and instead provide this:

It looks a lot like TravisCI, but on steroids! Very good news!