I’ve been working on a series of videos about an unpublished app of mine called FlipStream, and I wanted to easily insert some information about the current PowerPoint presentation on the first slide. Sadly, PowerPoint doesn’t have a generic field replacement function like Word does. So, either I type some stuff and have to remember … Read More
When you’re a full-stack developer, you often find yourself mixing and matching destination hosts on your development system. Sometimes you need to run your development codebase against a test back-end server, sometimes you need to spoof the test back-end with your local code base. All of this switching back-and-forth can be tedious, so I wrote … Read More
So, as part of my other post about writing a banner printer I ended up going down the rabbit hole of Unicode characters and combining marks. In the process, I found this wonderful blog post by Dmitri Pavlutin that explains the ins-and-outs of dealing with “complicated” text in JavaScript very well. But unfortunately it still … Read More
Coming up with contrasting, attractive colors for an unknown number of items can be tricky. This post gives a short (10 line) function that returns unique colors for an arbitrary number of items using bit manipulation.
Note: this was originally published on my personal blog (smeans.com) in 2018. So, I’ve been building projects using NoSQL databases (like MongoDB and Apache CouchDB) for several years now, and there are a lot of things I really like about them. But one need I’m always bumping up against is the ability to summarize tons of … Read More