While scrolling through my GitHub feed I noticed a recent fork (5 hours ago) of a repo of mine.

Nothing so weird so far.

Out of curiosity I checked if the user wanted to make a decent PR and improve something in the code.

The user in fact made a new commit on their fork and added a new file. A new GitHub action.

Let me explain what happened.

Read more about my experience switching the static hosting for this very site.

Namely from a combination of AWS S3 + CloudFlare, to only CloudFlare Pages.

Will get into hiccups, overall experience and ease of use.

Il Lean Validation Playbook

Insieme a Fightbean e Matteo Cavucci abbiamo costruito il Lean Validation Playbook.

Che cos'è?

The Lean Validation Playbook è una raccolta di metodi per testare idee e soluzioni legate alla creazione di prodotti digitali e affronta il lato operativo che manca a molte strategie di business.

In questo post descrivo come abbiamo messo online un sito statico con 11ty e altri strumenti utilizzati per organizzare il lavoro.

This is my approach to a purely client side search feature for static blogs and sites.

I am currently using this under /posts to let readers search through my blog posts.

Read more below about how to integrate it in your site.

Wanted to share what apps & services I'm currently self-hosting on my small Linode VPS

TLDR;

Using docker-compose, nginx and CloudFlare

• WireGuard VPN
• Miniflux RSS
• Planka kanban board
• Pleroma Fediverse instance
• Linkding bookmark manager
• Commento for comments on this blog
• Umami Web analytics
• Snapdrop - local file sharing

Everything runs smoothly on a "Nanode" (Linode's version of a 5$/month VPS with 1GB RAM, 25GB SSD, 1 CPU)

Found a way to easily connect and disconnect from a network in Manjaro.

The solution is having separate connections for your Wireguard VPN or Pi-hole instance, alongside your usual network you connect to.

Found the perfect combination for self-hosting my reading stack: Miniflux and Wallabag, you may now kiss!

UTM parameters are used since the dawn of time to track marketing campaigns.

Can you use them to reduce dark/direct traffic and label RSS subscriptions?

Below you can find resources for getting started with Elixir.

A few months ago I requested a data export from my former google account.

Especially containing emails and contacts saved in my account.

Received a 3GB zip file containing a 10GB mbox file.

This is how I managed to read it, either in the terminal (mutt) or with Thunderbird.

Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency invented in 2008 by an unknown person or group of people using the name Satoshi Nakamoto, is trademarked? Is it really?

This is something I wanted to build for a long time: a Bitcoin price watcher and indicator as an elegant desk accessory.

I want to outline the tools I use to consume textual content, and why it perfectly fits my needs.

Who knows, maybe this can be helpful for you too.

These are my notes for learning Elixir.

Setting myself the challenge to learn Elixir, again.

This will take you less than 5 minutes to get a private VPN on your own Ubuntu server.

YES!

Comments are back, and I'm curious to see if this can spark some interesting discussions and be worth the hassle of self-hosting the comments.

Be it a filter for your dashboard, the date of an article, or a simple pagination number.

Please, put that in the URL, ok?

Incredible!

70k visitors / 100k pageviews (excluding those with analytics blockers installed) reached this very website in the last year.

First of all, what is Mastodon?

From joinmastodon.org

it's a network of thousands of communities operated by different organizations and individuals that provide a seamless social media experience

You just got your 3D printer, and you already plugged it in.

Assembly: done 👍️

Filament: ready ✔️

STL file: affirmative ✳️

You put your SD card in and hit "Print" 🖨️

Webmention is a simple way to notify any URL when you mention it on your site. From the receiver's perspective, it's a way to request notifications when other sites mention it.

From https://www.w3.org/TR/webmention/

I personally fell for each of these approaches.

But then I learned how to embrace them.

They will change your way of thinking.

And eventually make you a better programmer over time.

Here you can find my notes about the course "Blogging for business" by ahrefs.com

I highly recommend following the step by step course to convert your blogging from a waste of time to a source of potential customers and sales.

Node.js 15 has been released, with exciting changes and improvements!

In a sentence:

Anything about your code and development environment that slows you down.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy is a real pain.

It's a cost that you sustained in the past (be it time, money, energy, whatever) and cannot be reversed, cancelled or undone.

The fallacy is that yet knowing about the sunk cost of a project, you are often tempted to justify your future investments because of your past (most likely lost) investments.

The sunk cost should not influence your future decisions, yet it does. And the outcomes are often delusion, sadness and stress.

First of all: this is based on the idea of https://simonwillison.net/2020/Oct/9/git-scraping/ and https://github.com/simonw/ca-fires-history

The gist:

• every 20min
  • scrape hackernews frontpage items
  • save them in hn.json
  • commit and push

Find the git repository here at christian-fei/hn-history

This is a short summary of my experience while writing a simple HackerNews scraper.

As a pure exercise or kata if you want, I tried to apply Clean code, Refactoring and Testing priciples for this small npm module.

The task is simple:

Get the posts on the front page of https://news.ycombinator.com and parse them.

Plausible Analytics recently introduced Custom props for events (here the docs).

This was the perfect opportunity for me to implement an idea I had long time ago: (Privacy-friendly) Polls with Plausible Analytics!

The idea is to use Plausible's Custom props and hook them up to a simple poll component in JavaScript!

Let's get started 🚀

This happened to me recently, and I couldn't understand the cause.

"Suddenly", after updating some npm packages, my npm install was "not working".

It exited abrubtly with status code 137, with the error message "Killed".

This is a short summary of what I learned while playing around with my Bangle.js Watch.

I managed to

• add an application to the Bangle.js (with create-bangle-app)
• send accelerometer data over Bluetoot Low Energy
• discover & connect to BLE devices with Node.js
• read accelerometer data with Node.js (coming from the watch)

Saw the following error when I was trying to install an npm dependency, that had native C bindings:

Recently I got myself a treat: a Bangle.js Watch! ⌚️

It's a pretty awesome, open-source watch based on Espruino and Node.js, and much more! 🤓

Read about my experiments here especially for creating a mouse-watch app with Node.js and Bluetooth Low Energy!

My notes about the Ted X talk by Gleen Greenwald at Ted X Global 2014.

The recording of the talk can be found here on yewtu.be

These are my notes about the Interview of Edward Snowden by Ron Paul at the Liberty Report.

Video can be found here on yewtu.be

If you need to show many list items, one common technique to overcome this issue, is to apply the concept of "virtual scrolling".

Read about how I personally get things done.

Recently I stumbled upon this paper about “I've Got Nothing to Hide” and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy by Daniel J. Solove

Do yourself a favor and read it here

Doing an experiment with my RPi 4, using it as a small but powerful local server.

My current PC is a 10 year old Macbook Pro 13" 2010, which is sluggish sometimes.

So I want to offload some heavy tasks (ffmpeg time-lapse creation, long-running tasks and services) to the Raspberry Pi and connect to it either via LAN or Wi-Fi.

Below you can read my findings about performance, applications and general issues I encountered and tried to solve.

Some resources I found while researching the argument of "I have nothing to hide":

Using an ESP8266 for IoT projects makes me go fast while prototyping.

The compact format is perfect for small DIY devices.

Wi-Fi connectivity is built-in, and it's super affordable.

The ESP8266 is a low-cost Wi-Fi microchip, with a full TCP/IP stack and microcontroller capability (wikipedia)

Time-lapses always fascinated me. So I wanted to create one on my own.

Had a spare Raspberry Pi Zero W catching dust, you can purchase one for ~ 25$ and the related Raspberry Pi Camera module for < 20$.

Rough overview

AirPods are awesome, and are also a failed product from Apple.

And I fell for it, as many, many others:

• iphonehacks.com
• discussions.apple.com 1
• discussions.apple.com 2
• iphonetricks.org
• annoying.technology
• reddit.com
• macrumors.com
• reddit.com
• newsbreak.com
• ipadinsight.com
• twitter.com

Struggling with dozens of newsletters in your inbox? (or should I say "Imbox"? </troll>)

I use this super simple organizational trick / habit when signing up for newsletters.

To be found, you need to describe yourself well to computers

SEO is as important as a good mailing-list to reach your (potential) audience.

Over the past 10 years, I've made some mistakes and also took home some knowledge about SEO for blogs and websites.

Below I've compiled a list of techniques and code-snippets that I personally use (hint: view-source) to improve for organic website traffic and SEO.

To make your content more enjoyable by users (social media sharing, RSS, search results) and descriptive to machines (SEO).

After using Brave for almost a year, I can extract some stats from its usage over time:

• 152,906 trackers blocked
• 2,26GB of bandwidth saved
• "2,1 hours saved" (no clue how this is calculated)

But more importantly, I made some bucks!

Do you want to know how users make use of your site? Which links they click most and what converts most?

From the official documentation you can trigger custom events via JS, by including a small utility function plausible:

<script>
window.plausible = window.plausible || function() { (window.plausible.q = window.plausible.q || []).push(arguments) }
</script>

Whenever you call plausible('...event...') you put a tracking event in a queue (window.plausible.q) and will be tracked.

Purchased a convenient bundle of "Marketing for Developers" a few years ago. Time passes, and nearly forgot about the book and course. Priorities. Life. You know, first world problems.

Resumed the course, this time for real, and I’m trying to motivate myself by taking notes about my learnings.

Buy it here Marketing for Developers – advice for programmers, software, and SaaS

Let's say you have these documents in your collection items:

I would like to extract statistics about sub-documents in a collection.

E.g. in the form of count, sum and average for each field

Let's say you have the following documents in the items collection:

db.items.find()
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5f034ce90b15686f5d78baed"), "subDocument" : { "field1" : 42, "field3" : 10 } }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5f034ce90b15686f5d78baee"), "subDocument" : { "field2" : 14, "field3" : 6 } }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5f034ce90b15686f5d78baef"), "subDocument" : { "field1" : 6, "field4" : 11 } }
{ "_id" : ObjectId("5f034cea0b15686f5d78baf0"), "subDocument" : { "field3" : 3, "field4" : 26 } }

How would you solve the use-case of aggregating each field of the subDocument's dynamically?

Event without actually "knowing" which fields are contained in subDocument?

Recently I got into Linux again after a long hiatus.

I fell in love with Pop!_OS by System76.

Ubuntu 20.04 also looks gorgeous and made me want to go back to the Linux side.

So I started looking for a worthy laptop for the job, with excellent support for Linux, and these are my findings.

home-assistant.io is the latest great tool I discovered, it's simply a beautiful piece of technology.

Open source home automation that puts local control and privacy first

I recommend installing the Hass OS on a Raspberry Pi 4 with an SD Card of at least 32GB.

What: Code BEAM V official website

When: 2020/05/28 - 2020/05/29

Where: On the interwebz

Schedule: code-beam-v#schedule

Recently I stumbled upon an issue with a web application that was proxied by HAProxy.

The issue was that the requests that started from the HTML document were served and requested over HTTPS, but "inner" resources (AJAX calls, images, etc.) were configured as HTTP.

How to configure authenticated uplinks with Verdaccio.

My disk space was running low. I had less than 100MB of free space. I was sick of running low on disk space.

Clean My Mac wasn't an option. I don't want to spend 40$ for a cleaning tool, if you're so inclined feel free to do it.

You're seeing a blank page saying "HTTP_ERROR 431"?

And you're running a Node.js HTTP server, like express or fastify?

In case the npm registry goes down, it's wise to have a backup registry.

privacy matters, and coherence costs

Motivation

I tried to do a self-examination, reflecting on what matters to me about Privacy.

Being more aware of what you share while browsing the web comes with experience and can be seen as a journey.

Yesterday I wanted to monitor the processes that my Elixir application was spawning.

I knew there was something called Observer, but couldn't remember exactly how to do it.

Taking a look at the doc, I found this debugging page that mentioned :observer.start().

The suggested usage was with iex -S mix and then running :observer.start() in the mix shell manually.

I don't like manual things that much.

Today a dear user made me aware that my RSS feed broke. There was a XML Parsing Error for cri.dev/rss.xml.

ASAP after work I checked the validity through validator.w3.org/feed/ and in fact there were some issues with it.

Dark mode is everywhere nowadays. Personally using darkreader as an extension of Brave browser, and I'm loving it.

But if you want to roll your own, for fun or for whatever reason, continue reading to understand how I did it.

µcompress is a lovely utility by WebReflection that compresses common static files.

A micro, all-in-one, compressor for common Web files

Using it since commit ce0a9e on this very website, in my GitHub Actions workflow.

Sick of ads on the Web, YouTube and other services?

Do you have a Raspberry Pi (4, 3, or even a Zero like me) laying around collecting dust and you want to make use of it?

Use it for ad-blocking in your home network and to finally browse the web, watch videos etc. without annoying ads.

A long awaited feature of the language and runtime has been released and is available in Node.js 14 (and modern browsers): Optional chaining!

The Nullish coalescing operator in useful to handle default values, without short-circuiting on values that result as falsy.

Falsy values are undefined, null, false, 0, NaN, and '' in JavaScript, and sometimes you want to retain those values, explicitly excluding null and undefined.

Let's try to monitor crypto assets through the Coinmarketcap API, with Elixir!

Topics I want to explore in this exercise are:

• Elixir Supervision trees
• HTTP calls with Elixir (with HTTPoison)
• TDD and Refactoring

As soon as Elixir was released a few years ago, I got into it and started learning and building things with it.

Thanks to the help of some dear colleagues I had the opportunity to get valuable feedback and learn even more concepts about GenServers, the BEAM virtual machine, ETS and Erlang+Elixir in general.

I also went to my first Erlang+Elixir conf, and had the chance & honour to meet Joe Armstrong, #rememberingjoe.

On 2020/04/22, during quarantine, I decided to get back to Elixir (who knows: maybe even dabble with Erlang directly).

I post-poned this too much now, it's time to get back to the distributed programming world.

Without further ado, below my journey (in form of a daily journal) about learning more about Elixir (again), the BEAM, plausible analytics and things discovered along the way!

devblog is yet another lightweight static site generator.

Although there are widely used SSG like 11ty (which this blog was previously based on), Jekyll (also previously used), GatsbyJS and many others, I wanted to get my hands dirty and understand how to make the process of building a static blog even simpler, if possible.

Even simpler in the sense of "it does just what I need and nothing more".

Install via npm i -g devblog or create a blog with a one-liner npx devblog init my-new-blog, cd my-new-blog and serve with npx http-server _site 8080. It's that easy.

Rebuild the blog by running npx devblog (or npm i -g devblog and then just run devblog in the main directory)

Continue reading my story of building devblog.

After quite a bit of research, I found the full list of Chromium Command Line Switches.

I was encountering this error when trying to set up a puppeteer instance with a proxy.

In a previous post I tried to explain how to troubleshoot an issue when connecting to a Proxy with Puppeteer investigating API documentations , Chromium flags and all that funny jazz..

Example repository and explanation to a practical crawling with browserless and puppeteer.

Browser automation built for enterprises, loved by developers.

browserless.io is a neat service for hosted puppeteer scraping, but there is also the official Docker image for running it locally.

I was amazed when I found out about it 🤯!

Find the whole source code on Github christian-fei/browserless-example!

GitHub example repo

At christian-fei/twitter-oauth-login-in-nodejs on GitHub you can find the whole source code.

Learn how to create a Twitter OAuth Application

Lately I found myself dealing with Twitter and Google OAuth (1.0a and 2.0) to authorize a user to act on their behalf, namely reading profile information, reading and posting content on their behalf or other common permissions.

Since my process of trying to understand and make sense of OAuth has been both fun and rough, I wanted to summarize a full example in a single JavaScript file and document other findings along the way.

What is it?

Programming language, editor, and infrastructure for building backends

Functional / imperative hybrid language is influenced by Elm, Rust, OCaml, Swift, Ruby on Rails, Clojure, TypeScript.

Today I stumbled upon this official doc by cloudflare stating the current TLD - Policies.

It is like finding a treasure for me because I was looking for an official list of supported domains on Cloudflare, since I own a few .cc, .ninja, .xyz domains.

raspistill is the command line tool for capturing still photographs with the camera module.

Here you can find the official docs.

Curious about how to call an HTTP API like Twitter or GitHub by authenticating through OAuth (1.0a and 2.0)?

Read more about how to do it with Node.js

Learn how to create Twitter login with OAuth 1.0a.

🍅

As much as it hurts, this action had to be taken due to apparent trademark issues with the word pomodoro.

pomodoro.cc has to close.

Personally I use dotenv to handle different environments in my Node.js applications.

It gives you the ability to specify a .env file (generally provisioned on each environment with the corresponding environment variables), along these lines:

An example of connecting to mongodb with the Monk NPM module.

Lately, I was having issues with lerna while trying to publish packages from a mono-repo.

The problem was that lerna, sometimes, failed while publishing the changed packages (with the command lerna publish --conventional-commits)!

I want to share how I maintain my connect / express middlewares for simple HTTP APIs in Node.js

The code snippets below are taken from pomodoro.cc api source code.

I finally managed to get the deployment of an eleventy - 11ty site (namely this one) and sync with AWS S3, where this blog is hosted.

speed matters

trying to work on your pc in 2019 is the worst if you are experiencing a slow internet connection.

Got the following error when running my playbook, with a newly installed external role:

fatal: [52.28.21.116]: FAILED! => {"msg": "The task includes an option with an undefined variable. The error was: 'ansible_distribution' is undefined\n\nThe error appears to have been in '.../tasks/main.yml': line 1, column 3, but may\nbe elsewhere in the file depending on the exact syntax problem.\n\nThe offending line appears to be:\n\n\n- debug:\n  ^ here\n"}

If you stumbled upon this article, you are probably seeing the following error message on travis in the deployment stage:

To make Anaconda executables like conda or anaconda-navigator available in your shell, you'll need to edit your ~/.config/fish/fish.config and add the directory where the commands are located.

If you're using Anaconda with Python 2.x, the path will be /anaconda2/bin/.

For Python 3.x and up: /anaconda3/bin/

I found it. It found me...

Whatever!

I came across the only documentation about cloning a git repo with the [--depth option](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-clone#git-clone

I don't know about you, but I always struggled with keeping track of my cryptocurrency assets that I have on different exchanges.

With the help of cryptosheet.cc I am now able to get a realtime view of my account balances on different exchanges like GDAX, Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Gatehub, Block.io.

Rate limiting API calls to an HTTP service doesn't have to cumbersome and too complicated.

A simple way to achieve this (and that I use all the time) is to combine Promise.all with an npm package called p-limit.

p-limit is used to run multiple promise-returning & async functions with limited concurrency.

Lately I felt overwhelmed by my Obsessive Compulsive Reminder Disorder ™. In other words, my Inbox was full of interesting links that I saved as a reminder, but easily got out of hand:

Today I sat down and wrote a tiny package called wait-for-user-input. it can be used to wait for stdin input in a command line script.

Market data is generally represented as an array of arrays, and each entry is a data point that represents a "snapshot" of the market in a given period of time.

Related: Read how I build my site.

Related: Read how I deploy my site.

Today I installed redash with AWS EC2 and AWS SES, with the help of the official guide.

Lately I have been following the Standard.JS style guide (after disliking ava & xo) and took style-guides in general more seriously.

Today, at the issue date of #338 of Hacker Newsletter, I tried:

• not to read ahead
• not to "spoil" me any links (maybe it's just me)
• to reflect on how to learn the most out of each issue of Hacker Newsletter

Requirements

• a Jekyll blog (of course)

Create search.json

Create a file search.json with this content https://github.com/christian-fei/Simple-Jekyll-Search/blob/master/example/search.json

I had a blast at this year's FOSDEM.

Today I started using joebew42`s daily activity log concept.

It was very interesting to see his progress and keeping track of his studies and interesting reads over the course of over 4 months!

Here`s my take.

Now I want to try it and to see it as a log and motivation/reminder to study regularly. I will also use it probably as a aid to review the studies and to visualize the progress.

Finally I will also find a way to integrate it with pomodoro.cc, I`m sure about that..

I ran into this gotcha today as I was playing with Plug of Elixir.

Angular is a JavaScript framework for creating modern web applications, which are inherently declarative, modular, with testability in mind.

Angular`s digest loop is like a baby: you need to take care of it and feed it well, or it will puke all over your nice shirt. Actually, it will probably, eventually do it anyway.

AppCache is a nice guy when it comes to caching stuff, but at the end of the day it is just a fucking douchebag.

For me AppCache is a smelly, almost invisible, annoying little parasite.

If you're having trouble cleaning up the mess this guy did (aka invalidate the cache), these simple steps will lessen your burden and throw this douchebag out of the parents' house.

Let's say you want to filter odd numbers from a list of numbers, like [1,2,3,4,5,6] should become [1,3,5].

One way to solve this problem in a functional fashion is to provide an odd filter function, that is internally composed by a negation of an even filter on those numbers.

Recently I got the opportunity to work in a legacy, and wanted to share what I learned about gaining confidence and still deliver business value.

I hope this will help you to push your productivity level to the edge and to find the ultimate flow to contribute to open source projects with ease :)

You need to install hub, which is a tool that will wrap your git cli tool with some useful utility functions to interact with GitHub.

Let's say you have an array of things.

You want to provide to your user the ability to select two things from this array.

If you use the <select> tag you won't be able to select multiple options from this list unfortunately. You can either come up with a new directive that handles this, use somebody else's plugin, or roll your own Angular filter (probably for learning purposes).

Drone listens on port 80 by default. If you want to host your application on the same server, then that's an issue.

There are countless continous integration continuous integration tools: Travis, Jenkins, Shippable, Circle, CodeShip, Wercker, etc.

Resizing an image to the desired size and proportion sounds like a simple process, but I found it quite challenging using Preview since I don't own a legitimate copy of Photoshop.

Fortunately I came across a nice tool that exists since the archaic times of computers (for me at least), since 1999, that gives me very handy commands to solve this workflow. It's called ImageMagick.

Angular's DI in combination with lazy loading of dependencies is one of my favourite features of Angular.

I was fascinated about the simplified API that Angular provides to make DI happen and the ability to create testable, modular code out of the box.

Anyways we are here to look what's behind Angular's DI, so here we go.

Let's take a simple example: a TicTacToe gamefield saved as a nested array in MongoDB.

In the Collection a gamefield document has the following structure:

Let's say you made a jQuery plugin and want to have an output (like a list of search results), whose aspect and format can be defined by the user.

Theory

The theory is very simple:

With a JSON file/object and the template the user provided you can create a basic templating system.

Disqus is definitely one of the best commenting systems out there (not to mention that it is responsive). As a speed freak I'm always concerned how much assets a website needs to load, affecting the overall load time of it.