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Written by Nils Knappmeier who has been a full-time web-developer since 2006, programming since he was 10 years old.

  1. December 29, 2023

    Holiday projects are nice. And this one does not have to do much with programming. I am going to build an Enterprise D lamp from 4mm wood sheets. This is about planning and fist steps.

  2. May 14, 2023

    In this post, I want to share some interesting conclusions from my attempt to write the baa-lexer. How can I reduce the bundle-size of my TypeScript project, without sacrificing modularity? Which compiler-settings create boilerplate code that can be omitted?

  3. April 21, 2023

    "Small" does not have to mean "dirty". For my "handlebars-ng" project, I rewrote an existing JavaScript lexer from scratch and despite my focus on readable code and a concise architecture, it turned out to be smaller than the original and slightly faster.

  4. April 18, 2023

    I am now tracking site-usage of various sites. But I am not tracking you. How does that work? A short glance in into the world of small tech-companies that do not sacrifices their values for profit..

  5. January 04, 2023

    I recently created a new website and came across "solidjs.com", a relatively new web-framework. What amazed me was the fact that it combines the good things from React and Vue, leaving away the bad parts. For future projects, if it's my decision alone, I will consider it as a replacement for React.

  6. October 29, 2022

    When I ran out of CI/CD minutes on gitlab.com, I had to find a solution to run my own gitlab-runner, preferably so that I didn't have to pay for the computing time. I decided to run it on my own computer.

  7. September 04, 2022

    The mock-service-worker can be used to mock backends. You can use it in tests, but also in demos. Unlike real http-server frameworks like express.js, the mock-service-worker does not have that notion have "middleware", and I struggled a bit my mock-authentication for the Gachou demo implemented... Here is a solution, and may be feature-suggestion for the mswjs team.

  8. August 15, 2022

    We can convert OpenAPI specs to TypeScript clients. We can create mock-APIs with the mock-service-worker library. How about converting an OpenAPI spec to TypeScript types for the mock-service-worker library. It's magic...

  9. August 07, 2022

    End-to-end tests tend to be slow and flaky. So how about using a mock backend to test your frontend. The "mock-service-worker" library helps you create such backends. And you can use it for more than just testing.

  10. July 03, 2022

    Many backend frameworks, independent of the language in use, can automatically generate OpenAPI specifications the server code. We can use this specification to build documentation and a user-interface for testing. But we can also use it to generate client code for our web-frontend. Here are some code-generators.

  11. June 11, 2022

    When going mono-repo, I noticed that the Node.js package "husky" can actually be replaced by a single line of code. And it works for people that do not have Node.js installed.

  12. May 31, 2022

    I actually wanted to use Preact for my pet project. Several build-tools and frameworks later, I stuck with the things that I know mostly. Read on, if you are interested in a non-comprehensive evaluation...

  13. May 21, 2022

    End-to-End tests require the whole application to be running. This includes backend and database - which have to talk to each other. I thought it was not possible to do such a setup in Gitlab-CI. Now I know better.

  14. May 14, 2022

    In Spring-Boot, creating test-data was easily done via the `@SqlGroup`. Quarkus does not support this feature. Even worse: If you want to run Quarkus-tests against a native image, you don't have access to the internals of the project at all. This article describes my way of solving the issue of providing predictable test-data to integration tests.

  15. April 29, 2022

    For my pet-project Gachou, I decided to use Java and Quarkus to implement the backend. And since I have used clean-architecture at work for a couple now, I decided to use the same thing here. A pity, that we always used Spring Boot and Quarkus has some quirks of its own in this respect. Read on, if you want to know how I solved the exercise...

  16. January 16, 2022

    The obvious benefits of TypeScript is type-safety in function calls, variables assignments and so on. This post describes use-cases that are not obvious, but can still help you with your typings: The benefit of using typed strings in your path-patterns and router-functions.

  17. December 22, 2021

    The ultimate frontend setup I had the luck to work on two green-field projects in the last one and two years. The frontend setup, that we…

  18. December 19, 2021

    A couple of years ago, I was looking for software to manage our family photos and videos. The following features were important to me…