O3M 70 - Tamagotchi
Mind melting music to make you feel stimulated. You are the tamagotchi.
Node.js dynamic settings
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, …).
- Load configs from environment variables.
- Fallback from environment to config file.
- App lives in one folder.
Hello Google Cloud Platform and good bye AWS
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.
OLMOTO - An app built by beginners
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.
https://github.com/janikvonrotz/olmoto
Some technical features and challenges we solved:
React image loader with a spinner
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.
O3M 69 - Bazoooka
Powerful tracks mixed by the machine.
Meteor create user with a profile and custom attributes
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.
Can the European Union Learn from Switzerland? - An Essay by Till Rahn
I questioned this as well. Why shouldn’t a state or union such as the EU copy successful models. Till Rahn wrote an essay about this topic, which is right now more relevant than ever. With GB leaving the EU there are a lot of unanswered questions. I really enjoyed reading his essay. In order to preserve it I made a copy:
O3M 68 - Oh my bass
Hey there. This time I got some bass blasting flipping vocal tracks for you. Overwerks latest tracks made the finisher and made it a great list. Nice to hear that he’s still on track and still produces amazing stuff. However a featuring with Sia seems like the music industries commercialisation finally got him hooked up.
Meteor productive deployment blank page
First some background. I’ve built a Meteor app and decided to deploy it to Heroku. There are many short and simple guides out there on how to do that. As I did so and opened the App for the first on Heroku I simply received a blank page. Where did my javascript code go? Heroku logs didn’t tell much.