Organizing a Mountain Town Meetup – Series Introduction – Part 1
The Backstory Garrett and I have been organizing meetups for the Truckee nonprofit, Tahoe Silicon Mountain, for over 8 years. We’ve helped grow it from a small monthly meetup with a handful of attendees to a group of 1,200+ with 3 monthly events, including Mountain Minds Monday, which attracts 40-100+ people each month. Plus, we hold…
Read MoreFetching a File in NodeJS with Request and Parsing It with Readline
Recently, I was working on a project where I needed to fetch a file from the internet and parse it line by line. NodeJS has the readline module that can be used to split a data stream into lines and perform a function on each line, which was perfect for my needs. The problem is…
Read MoreAutomatically Creating Github Issues Using Webtask.io
I am the co-organizer of the BeerJS meetings for TahoeJS. BeerJS is a casual meetup for JavaScript developers that has chapters all over the world. Our meetup is largely organized using a Github repo. As co-organizer, one of my monthly tasks is to create a Github issue for the upcoming meeting. The issue announces the…
Read MorePros and Cons of Using Medium as a Blogging Platform
I published my first blog post on Medium. It is called, Updating Your React Native App. It’s been interesting comparing and contrasting the experience of writing on Medium vs. writing on my own WordPress blog at McCullough Web Services. Here’s what I liked about writing on Medium:
Read MoreBreaking Change with setState in React 16 Alpha Affecting React Native 43+
Recently, I upgraded the React Native app at Build.com to version 45.1. While testing the app, we discovered an undocumented change to the way that setState works. This change will affect React Native version 43+ and is due to a change in the React 16 alpha library. In this post, I’ll describe this breaking change…
Read MoreReact Native 45 Errors in Jest
At Build.com, a co-worker and I are in the process of updating our app to the most recent version of React Native, 0.45.1. We’re currently working to fix up our tests in Jest and I thought I’d share with you some issues that we’ve discovered.
Read MoreCreating Your First npm Package
Creating Your First npm Package Lately, I’ve been pushing myself to contribute more to open source. I started by contributing to existing projects: small features and writing documentation. I even wrote a blog post about it. This past week, I was finally able to make the jump from contributing to a project to authoring one.…
Read MoreGetting Started in Open Source
Getting Started in Open Source “The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs” – Richard Stallman Recently, I’ve been working to contribute more to Open Source software. The following post is based on that experience and research for a presentation I did with Jordan Papaleo for TahoeJS. Contributing to Open Source…
Read MoreFrom Ski Instructor to Programmer – My Journey Back to Programming
On the surface, I have a stereotypical story for a programmer: I started programming at a young age, went to college for computer science and now I’m a senior JavaScript developer. But for around 8 years, I didn’t program at all and didn’t work in a technical field. This is the story of how I…
Read MoreFixing the React Native Error: “Unable to open URL: telprompt”
At Build.com, we use Bugsnag to help monitor our app for crashes and errors. The other day, I noticed a group of errors that all took the form: Error: Unable to open URL: telprompt:5551231234 After some research, I figured out what was causing the bug and how to fix it.
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