software - Xander Dumaine

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A collection of 39 posts

Linguistics for Software Engineers

Linguistics for Software Engineers

Note: I didn't originally write this as a blog post. I wrote it as a text to a teacher friend of mine, so it might read awkwardly I had an experience at work that I thought might be a good lesson for students. I'm working on an app and in

Returning a promise inside try/finally

Returning a promise inside try/finally

Today I learned a quirk of try/finally as it relates to handling of returned promises: My understanding is was that, in most cases, these are equivalent: // 1 const result = await somePromise; return result; // 2 return somePromise; // 3 return await somePromise; But in the case of a try/finally -

WebRTC with async/await

WebRTC with async/await

Basic WebRTC connection setup can be confusing to understand, and there really is a lot going on that is black magic. Even so, just getting a single page connection going is confusing. I wanted to try writing some async/await code to test out browser compatibility and try different patterns,

Hacking Alexa to send Arbitrary Texts

Hacking Alexa to send Arbitrary Texts

I finally jumped on the Alexa bandwagon this week, and picked up an Amazon Dot. I got the Dot, because it's a lot cheaper than the Echo, and I already have an old speaker hanging around that I can use with it. Just to clarify - the Dot is a

WebRTC Phone User Experience

WebRTC Phone User Experience

Last year, &Yet wrote a great series [https://blog.andyet.com/2016/01/21/att-webrtc-ux-series/] of blog posts with AT&T about WebRTC UX. We love to see this kind of focus in the WebRTC [https://webrtc.org/] community, because it shows an intersection of classic technology and modern web

Simple Image Lazy Loading with Ghost

Simple Image Lazy Loading with Ghost

I recently put up a post [https://blog.xdumaine.com/a-year-in-review-2015] that happened to contain a bunch of images, and realized that the initial experience was kind of crappy, due to loading all of them at once. There were really two things I could do to improve this: lazy load

Surviving Mandatory HTTPS in Chrome

webrtc Featured

Surviving Mandatory HTTPS in Chrome

Chrome 47 brought a new change, and one that's caused a lot of confusion and irritation for some WebRTC developers. Despite the warnings and PSAs from the WebRTC team at Google, and the console deprecation warning, some didn't get the message that getUserMedia now requires that the requesting app be

Choosing a mobile platform to target

As a mobile developer, I often get questions like "Nice site! When's the mobile app coming?" or "we really need an app for this specific need, which platform should we use? or even "I want to make an app, but I don't know what yet - should I target iOS

Improved Chrome Extension UX, again

A few months ago, Philipp Hancke from &yet posted Improved Screensharing UX on Talky [https://blog.andyet.com/2015/03/30/talky-first-time-ux-matters] which specifically addresses the UX for first-time users. The problem being addressed is threefold: 1. In Chrome, desktop capture for screen sharing is enabled via the desktopCapture Chrome

Passions and Tools

I'm of the (unpopular) opinion that being excited about the framework or platform you're using as the focal point of the work you're doing, you're focused on the wrong thing. People are going nuts about Ember and React, .NET coming to Mac, Rails or Django. All of these are just

Markdown Preprocessor

I recently added a feature to my application to serve arbitrary markdown documents from a directory. This is designed to allow authors to populate a folder full of help documents, and be able to view them without any code changes. However, because this is an MVC application, I needed a

Get Your Feet Wet Before You Ask "How's the water?"

One of the most important things we try to teach our non-tech-savvy family and friends when we're helping them with their computers and devices is this: > Experiment. Play. Learn. Teach yourself. You're not going to break it. This is even a lesson we teach to kids, when learning about almost

Creating an OpenId Relying Party and Provider In .NET

Preamble/Motivation I'm working on an MVC web app that will soon be moving to Azure. The big roadblock to moving the application is that it uses LDAP to communicate accross our local intranet to our Active Directory domain controller to authenticate users. The de facto method of authenticating users

Calling Open Source Software Unpaid Labor and GitHub a Resume

There's currently quite [http://blog.jcoglan.com/2013/11/15/why-github-is-not-your-cv/] a bit [http://ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-and-the-oss-community] of discussion [http://code.dblock.org/github-is-your-new-resume] flying around [http://anti-pattern.com/github-is-your-resume-now] regarding whether GitHub should be used in place of a resume when considering candidates for a software position. Part

Self Improvement 2.0 and the Role of Software

It used to be that the term "Self Improvement" meant reading a book about eating better, exercising more, or controlling anger (maybe that's self help?) In any case, it was usually confined to you reading, watching, or listening to someone else tell you what you should probably do (most likely

FizzBuzz Code Golf in JavaScript

The FizzBuzz problem is defined as: > For the numbers 1 to 100, print "fizzbuzz" if the number is divisible by 3 and 5, "fizz" if it's only divisible by 3, "buzz" if it's only divisible by 5, and nothing if it's divisible by neither 3 nor 5. Each printed word

Ghost Beta Review

I've been using Ghost [http://ghost.org] as my blogging platform for a couple of weeks now, and I wanted to give it a brief review. It's important to note that it's still in a fairly early beta stage, so many features are absent and bugs are present. However, I

An Attempt to Explain the Joy of ASP.NET MVC Development

> This post is a follow-up to An Attempt to Explain the Pain of SharePoint Development [http://xdumaine.com/an-attempt-to-explain-the-pain-of-sharepoint-development] to show that I'm not all pessimistic, and that there are parts of my job that I really enjoy. The Development Environment If you're developing an ASP.NET MVC web application,

Fixing Error: Invalid File Name When Generating Entity Classes for SharePoint with SPMetal

Don't look at me like that - the long title was for SEO. If you're developing in SharePoint and at one point included a list in your solution that you later removed from the solution, but didn't first delete from the site, you'll find that that list is now corrupted.

Renaming a SharePoint Server

Preface: I've only done this in a development environment, but I've done it twice and it worked pretty well. Rename the Server I did this the default Windows method, through PC info, as if it was any other machine rename. Rename the SharePoint Server Googling for how to do this

Staying Relevant In My Field

Staying relevant in your field is ridiculously hard. It's even harder when your field is broad, and even harder when you're not quite sure where in the broad spectrum of your field you want to land. I read an example of a financial success story recently. A woman who drew

Reusing SharePoint ListView and ListForm Web Parts

When creating custom pages in SharePoint, you may, at some point, simply want to display a ListView web part (XsltListViewWebPart) to display a whole view of a list on your custom page, or you might want to display only a list form. A list form might be the default Display,

Setting up Wordpress URL Structures for Ghost

This is a pretty hacky solution, but since dynamic routing and custom URL structures are on the roadmap for Ghost, I just wanted a quick and dirty solution to getting my old WordPress links to work in my new Ghost blog. The permalink options for WordPress allow you to choose

GitHub Gist

As a blogger about software, I often want to actually post code in my blog posts. There are multiple ways to do this, and each one has it's merits. The things I wanted were: * Basic syntax highlighting * Easy to type and read the code in the editor * Easy to read

Creating Application Pages in SharePoint

I'm currently working on a SharePoint project which requires deploying multiple custom pre-configured pages. These are pages that have web parts, but aren't the standard "configure this page however you want" pages in SharePoint. I've found that the best way to achieve this is to create a "web part page"