During the last seven weeks I’ve spent a lot of time in California. With my study class we worked on projects with local companies in the Silicon Valley. It was a great experience. For the weekends I had decided to visit Yosemite and the beautiful lake Tahoe again. Despite the Californian drought I had some good hikes there. Before leaving for home I took a flight to Costa Rica and spent a week there. Seeing the caribbean coast not on a post card was a very nice thing. Now here are some pictures you might like:
Public transport in America is hard to endure as a swiss.
For my last project I had to build a web application to administrate a MongoDB database. Due to using Meteor quite a lot I heard about Graphql and the Apollostack. Graphql, which is a specification done by Facebook engineers, promises to be the better REST API (which I hope it is). I became curious and decided the build the server API with Apollo. First I tried to evade using the Meteor as build system as I don’t want to get too accustomed to this full-stack ecosystem. However, building a live-reload server and client build system in ES6 with Node.js, Babel and Webpack was simply too much work compared to building this simple web app. So in result this was my stack:
While working on a new chatbot I had to come up with good examples to start and led a conversation with the chatbot. For this I analyzed other bots, tracked the steps it takes to achieve a specific goal and kept notes on repeating patterns. In result me and my team came up with a few basic principles to design dialogs in conversational bots.
As I’m relatively new to Node I had to wrap my head around a very basic thing. Getting external variables into my app. Loading settings for different environments from config files and via environment variables (for heroku deployment) should supposedly be an easy challenge. However, none of the solutions I’ve found were well enough for my scenario:
Store config in json file.
Have different configuration files (development, production, …).
Yesterday late afternoon I had the great idea to update my AWS EC2 instance to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This website and two other sites are hosted on this machine. A Piwik installation and a mail forwarder as well. So it’s not that much, but still very essential to me. The upgrade didn’t go well, the system literally broke.
One month ago I started teaching a friend the basics of JavaScript with Meteor, Mantra and React.
Together we’ve built an app to create and share events with friends. It was an awesome experience. Yesterday we launched a private version on heroku. For us this was a great accomplishment. I learned a lot from this project and thought about sharing it with world.
hey there, I’ve spent as usual a lot of time with React, Mantra and Meteor. While building a simple app I checked out the new Meteor standard for file handling Meteor-Files. It works great, I really recommend this awesome package. But that’s not what I want to show you. The app I’m working on loads pictures form the dropbox api. Downloading the pictures always takes a while. To make sure the user doesn’t get impatient the app is now displaying a spinner when the image is loading. I would to like to show you how I’ve built this image loader and spinner component.
For Meteor there are not many options left when choosing a user account package. The built-in option is the only use- and successful solution so far. The package is well documented and works like a charm. However, whenever I set up the account system in Meteor I am confronted with these two scenarios:
How can I extend the user profile object with data from a registration form? (A user should be able to edit the profile data himself later on.)
And how can I add other attributes to the user collection object? (A user should not be able to change a custom attribute himself later on.)
These are two fundamental obstacles almost every developer faces when setting up the account system. There are a lot of solutions out there on how to do this in Meteor properly, but a lot of them are poorly described and make it difficult the get the right idea of how the account system works. It got even more difficult due to API changes and Meteor itself that changed a lot over years. Now I would like to give a good example for this two questions.
