I’ve been using vim for coming up on four years now. It’s been an amazing ride so far and it’s impossible for me to imagine not using it anymore. This fear is what has kept me from exploring NeoVim until recently, and now I wish I would have looked into it perhaps a little sooner! In this post I’ll explain how I moved over to NeoVim and highlight some of the “gotchas” I’ve found so far.

A whirlwind of change has rocked my life since I’ve posted last, some of which has been the culprit for my lack of posts… I would look at the calendar and think to myself, “Wow, it’s been a couple weeks. I should capture some of what’s been happening.” Here I am now trying to highlight some of the major events and happenings since I last posted about five months ago. I’ll start with the highs, move into informative, then end on the low.

Last week we looked at JSON Schema and how it can be used it in describing the data of your API. In this post we’ll be looking at the JSON Hyper-schema. It is a schema built on top of the JSON Schema and describes the URLs that can be built with a given resource. Let’s look at how we can use this spec to help supplement our APIs.

I am a closet fan of the game “League of Legends”; mostly just as a spectator of famous streamers such as Trick2G. However, my wife loves to play the game and plays in the evenings. Things went wayward for her about a month or so ago when she started having huge lag spikes and high ping that seemed to start and then never clear up. Having done network support in the past I set out to try and solve this problem…

It’s pretty easy to stand up an API. Unfortunately sometimes though, this easiness is a false friend you can be paying for down the road. Once you get any amount of consumers; even if they are internal, expressing the data models your API delivers and how it is validated can be a messy chore. You may write up some fancy documents describing your API (which is good); however, this can lack a bit in the area of tooling. This is where JSON Schema can really shine.

I have been absent awhile; mostly enjoying a lengthy break over Christmas followed by an incredibly busy January. I’ve collected quite a bit over the last month or so which is being drafted up into posts for the next couple of weeks. I feel ready to get back into the swing of another year and am excited to see what awaits!

After visiting my sick grandfather in the hospital I realised the time spent in life offers no refunds. Take the opportunities you have today for the things you really want to do. I have really been wanting to go back to school and this hit home hard for me. There is so much more I want to learn and do with my life and the window I have to do it in is closing every day.

Sometimes we get complacent “dancing for the man”; staying comfortably distracted by the workday. Don’t let it happen! Always challenge and audit yourself to ensure you’re spending the time you have on the investments which are important to you.

If you come from Erlang and are familiar with the GenServer behaviour you may be interested in the Agent set of methods that ship with Elixir. They provide a lightweight mechanic to save and retrieve state. Here are two functionally equivalent modules, one written as a GenServer and the other with Agent.

How hard is it for a new person to pick up your project and start working on it? Think about the supporting database, message queues, mailer software, and any other systems your project ties into. Is there any kind of development credentials they’ll need? What is the process to get a change into production? When you go beyond the run-of-the-mill framework inside the vacuum of your local machine the barrier to getting started on a project can start to sky rocket. What are some ways we can help mitigate this?

If you haven’t tried it out yet, I highly recommend checking out the application jq. It allows you to quickly format json with bash or any other light weight scripting languages. I’ve been playing around with this for about a week and I would like to share some of the features it has.