Recent Changes

2026-03-30

• 12:44 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-30 Node.js and .env files . . . . mbork – The more I work with Node.js, the more I appreciate its built-in features. Supply chain attacks are a real thing and the more I can do without pulling in megabytes (or even kilobytes) of dependencies, the better. For example, one of the very common patterns in Node applications are configs in .env files. The traditional way to digest them is to use dotenv, which admittedly has zero dependencies – but nowadays even that is not necessary.

2026-03-23

• 17:53 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-23 Disabling Eslint in one line with Tide . . . . mbork – When coding in JavaScript, I use Eslint like everybody else. (Let’s set the discussion about Eslint vs. Oxlint for another time.) One problem I have is that sometimes (rarely, but not never) I need to tell Eslint that I broke one of the rules intentionally and I don’t want it to nag me about it.

2026-03-14

• 10:40 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-14 Selecting a sample of a PostgreSQL table . . . . mbork – Today I have a nice SQL tip about sampling tables in SQL. (I’m writing about PostgreSQL as usual but this applies to other databases, too, since this feature is in the SQL standard.) Imagine you have a large table and you want to get a general feeling about what its contents look like.

2026-03-09

• 15:41 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-09 Create ranges of numbers in vanilla JS . . . . mbork – Sometimes you need to create an array with the sequence of numbers, say from 0 to 9. Popular libraries like Lodash or Ramda have a function for that (in both cases, it’s called range), but how to do that concisely in vanilla JS? In case you’re wondering, both Lodash and Ramda use a while loop for this task; can we do better? (In this case “better” does not necessarily mean “faster”, but “shorter”, and – let’s be honest — “in a more clever/hackish/crazy way”.) It turns out that the answer is yes.

2026-03-02

• 16:39 UTC (new) (history) 2026-03-02 Lispy and Iedit . . . . mbork – A bit over a decade ago (!) I wrote about Iedit. It’s a very cool package, a bit similar to multiple cursors, very convenient for changing variable names (especially that it has a great feature where the change is restricted to the current function). I am also a Lispy user. Lispy requires Iedit (and has a binding for it different from the default one – M-i – while Iedit’s default I’m used to is C-;). The problem is, when I added Lispy to my Emacs, it disabled the default C-; (and only installed M-i in Elisp buffers). Now, I admit that M-i may be a better (or at least not worse) keybinding for Iedit than C-;. It’s default binding is tab-to-tab-stop, which is one of those useless commands Emacs has had probably for decades. Personally, I’m accustomed to C-;, so I wanted Lispy not to interfere with Iedit setting that keybinding.

More...