Face Recognition, Part 2: Face Detection

I am trying to manage our family pics so family members can find those they like, build calendars, show the right ones to others and so on. Face recognition is a part of it. To say "show me the best pics with A, B and C" face recognition is a solution. I had started and tried it a lot of times, but I never got to satisfying results. I believe now the tooling exists, the learning material is accessible for non AI experts, like me, and I just want to get it done and learn ML/AI on a topic that I care about.

This is JS (and) Crafting #11 - December 18th, 2023. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

This is JS (and) Crafting #11 - December 11th, 2023. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

This is JS (and) Crafting #10 - December 4th, 2023. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

This is JS (and) Crafting #9 - November 27th, 2023. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

The <KeyboardAvoidingView> is one component provided by react-native, which (magically) handles the screen to re-layout when the virtual keyboard opens on ones phone.
This component comes not without challenges, I had actually written about it and I still keep finding things, which make me dig deeper into it to understand and eventually (fix and) use it properly.

After live blogging on day 1 I made a plan for day 2. I will watch all content in 2x speed and just pause whenever I need a bit to write. It's just a video, so I can catch up by higher speed. Also I came to the conclusion that I don't even need to be fully in sync, except for the polls and the live chatting, but there is too much life going on in parallel that I am glad about the pause button.

I am taking some notes here, basically for deeper learning and reminding me of knowledge. If it is helpful for others, cool.

I had planned building the kata for Number.parseInt() already a while ago. Starting to work I discovered very quickly that this seemingly tiny kata is quite a rabbit hole that offers a lot of things one can learn. Especially about how things evolve in the spec and how to read the spec, fortunately this is a pretty easy to read part of the spec.

does not show a shadow

Unfortunately I discover very often when using jest that a lot of the things point me to smells in a test. Jest even encourages some of those instead of encouraging us to write better tests. I found some things over time, so I just collect them here.

This is post #3 in the category "Browser Tools", focusing on understanding the loading times by charting them in a Waterfall chart. In part 1 and part 2 about Resource Timing I covered the attributes startTime, responseEnd, duration and initiatorType. Now I want to understand what happens after a resource starts loading and what do some attributes mean, like fetchStart, requestStart and responseStart, to mention the most relevant ones.

This is post #2 about Resource Timing, with a focus on understanding loading dependencies. In part 1 "Resource Timing - The API" I covered the attributes responseEnd and startTime. Now I will try to show how the API can be used to see which resources block each other, which is the step to understand before optimizing site speed, a very essential step to know what is the right thing to optimize.

I want to explore the Resource Timing API, one of the Performance APIs, accessible via window.performance in all modern browsers.
This post is the start of a series of blog posts about browser tools, in which I look into any kind of tools or APIs in and around the browser, things web developers will hopefully find useful.

Since I moved to Linux for work I started to look up and collect the git commands I need most. On Linux I do not have my beloved GitUp app which is an amazing visual and fully keyboard controllable git tool available for MacOS only. Here is my list of git commands. As usual I created this collection so I know where to copy+paste commands from ;).

You don't need to rename all your ".js" files to ".ts" to go all in on TypeScript, you can go gradually. Adopt TypeScript step by step, become familiar with it in your existing JavaScript project. No need to put development on hold for weeks, while you convert the code base to TypeScript and fix all type errors. Read on to see how I adopt TypeScript for JavaScript for the sourcecode of jskatas.org.

When my build process slows down my work and I think about how to build just parts of a project instead of the entire project, my time is spent wrong. I should speed up the entire project's build process, not optimize for building parts. Read on about how I build, measured, sped up and will repeat for site-stitcher, the project that builds this site.

Uku creator of plausible.io had written a nice article on how to design, even though one is a miserable designer, as I am. A must read if you own the same skill deficiency ;).

I am a big fan of structured data and making the data we have on the web more accessible, easier to use, simply more worth it is a very useful thing. How useful is it investing in outlining your website's today? I found a couple articles and quotes on the web.

Having a useful and pleasant to read README does sometimes make a difference in deciding to spend more time with a package or project. The tips by James Scott really help, having a template like he provides is actually a really good idea. Thanks.

There is a uXSS bug in Chrome on iOS, which is actually a WebKit bug. But Chrome fixes it on iOS by crashing the browser, because this was the fastest way to fix it. Alright ...

TestStitcher can now not only handle one file but any number of files (see the commit that finished it) and show the tests in a structured way, see the README for all details.

I have been through a couple projects to build my blog. None survived, so I just build, just what I need, with just enough code to get it done.

It was the second time that we did Tetris as our task for the JSCodeRetreat and I have to say, that the participants' comment made me realize that we are on the right track. Though not all comments were purely in favor of Tetris, I think Tetris is the better task for a (JS) CodeRetreat.

It was Evren who triggered the idea of using Tetris as the task for the next JSCodeRetreat. And I have to say it was a good idea, it was a bit more challenging than the Game of Life and left more room for discussions and also allowed to explore more (software) design challenges.

In preparation for my last post Mikado Method to install a Vim Plugin I just had to read one of the good articles about the Mikado Method again. And when something really grabs my attention and I think there are relevant things in such an article (or video) I usually tweet the things I find most essential. So here is a collection of (some of) the things I find most relevant in that article.

I just wanted to install a github-flavored markdown plugin for vim. Until today I only used vim as it falls out of the box. So I had to do a couple detours before I got a vim plugin installed. Since I like the simplicity of the Mikado Method I apply it very often (maybe too often). In this case I used a very simple form of it, actually mainly to document all the steps I had to take on this detour. Read more below.

Back on the road. Three days of EnterJS are just over and I am already on the next trip, this time with HolidayCheck. So let me quickly sum up EnterJS where I had the pleasure to meet lots of interesting new people and to give a workshop on ES6 (and ES8) and a talk on the static type checker flow.

The callback-hell times are long over. We have better tools now. But which of the new kids on the block do you want to play with? In this meetup, last night we tried out async functions, also known by the name "async/await". It was a fun learning experience. Keep reading and get inspired.

This is JS (and) Crafting #8 - April 24th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. So let's get started with the newsletter...

This is JS (and) Crafting #7 - about crafting (and) JavaScript - April 17rd, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software.

This is JS (and) Crafting #6 - April 3rd, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

This is JS (and) Crafting #5 - March 27th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

This is JS (and) Crafting #4 - March 20th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

While refactoring some badly tested code, a pattern of how I extract dependencies emerged. The actual intention was to improve the testability. In this case dependency injection is the tool that helped me. Read here to find out the steps I found to separate the dependencies.

This is JS (and) Crafting #3 - March 13th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

In the last part #2 of the purescript series I got Purescript and it's executable installed, using yarn. Pulp seems to be the default "build system and package manager for PureScript projects" as Bodil Stokke states in her 1st commit to the project. Let me explore it a bit.

Welcome to the JS (and) Crafting #2 - March 6th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

This post is my 2nd write-down inspired by "Purescript by Example", the book by Phil Freeman, the author of purescript. Now about chapter 2, where I install Purescript and touch the tools for the first time. I am gonna use yarn instead of npm, let's see how that goes :).

I am convinced, that stricter types are of help when writing, reading and understanding source code. Why? Ever had the primitive obsession? And if you continue down the (type) rabbit whole, you get to stricter typing. And to Purescript, which attempts "to keep the semantics of JavaScript, while enjoying the syntax and type system of a language like Haskell".

Welcome to the JS (and) Crafting #1 - February 28th, 2017. Every Monday you will receive a hand-selected collection of links about JavaScript and how to craft better software. Let's get started ...

I just stumbled over https://imgix.com which looks like it could speed up a website building process and reduce the time one needs to invest in preparing images.

The annoying port 8080 is already in use message and not knowing which process is occupying this port sucks. I knew it was lsof that can help me. But how exactly? TL;DR: ps -p `lsof -i :8080 -t` -o command= (on Mac OSX)

gitup makes branches easy to understand show perfect overivew

Sometimes I stumble over commenting out a part in my JSX template. And I am always again looking for how to do that {# or {-- or what do I know.

ADR is a way to document decisions, reminds me of python's PEP.

What the heck does -%} mean in a Jinja template?
TL;DR: It removes whitespaces inside a block. The offical docs say it "strip[s] whitespace in templates [...] add a minus sign (-) to the start or end of a block", so {%- at the end of the block works too, but you better play with around with it to really understand it the dash is quite flexible.

This topic came up today when we discussed the #crewmeister API, and made me think. Until I remembered that we once in a project used to use the pure POST params, which are basically key-value pairs. And the question also reminded me of my PHP times, there the server-side knew how to handle a key which looks like user[0] and builds and array. But when I ran into that problem back then we used to use python and there we didn't have that.

There are seven kinds of coupling.

You want to learn with really good examples why all inheritance is bad, and why you should think twice if you want to inherit in places or if you jump on the ship with the new tool/library/framework that forces you to inherit from it's base class. Watch the first 30 minutes https://vimeo.com/163860086 (exactly until 30:00).

This sticks out, so far :) Avdi Grimm's article about the law of demeter, reading it including all commetsn until the end will take a bit of time but is exactly what explains a lot of things that imho we do wrong in lots of software we write, I am working on improving myself around it. For the completeness here is the paper initially laying out the law of demeter.

Actually we are currently discussing and evaluating to use react or alike and this react lifecycle comes in perfectly and somehow also makes the point stronger that a well documented, cared and widely used project is a good thing to be using. Decided!

Just programming stuff, e.g. react alternatives, elm, emberjs, ruby and various other stuff.

This document, I assume by Jim Weirich made me understand where rake came from and it will hopefully also make it easier for me to understand getting a grip on how it ticks. This is something I need when working with tools. I found the above in this rake tutorial.

Till Nowak: Delivery

In Ruby "and and or are control flow operators, not boolean operators".

In the ruby koans I now came across array functions. One is collect and I thought, this is map, and the comment below said

A colleague just pointed me to the article about Six Thinking Hats. What I really like about this is that it removes the personal part from a solution finding, discussion, etc.

This collection has links on privacy and Edward Snowden, emberjs and others about HTML5, security, coding, testing, etc..

At this point in the EmberJS Framework Basics Part 2 video the author explains how you can make (computed) properties out of 'normal' methods by using what the ember.js Ember.Object offers. It starts out with friend.age(), which returns what you expect. The author wants to write this as a property (as one accesses it in ember!) like this friend.get('age'). How is that done? Well, ember extends the native prototype of Function, so you can write this inside an ember object definition age: function (){}.property().

730.975 byte - the size of the main JS file of an empty app that ends up in the dist folder after building the app by ember build --environment=production.

This article about closures in ruby started somewhere by saying "Ruby has four different ways of using closures, each of which is a tad bit different, and sometimes nonsensical".

In the last days I had to learn a lot about how to use, write and understand user stories. This talk by Mike Cohn is a pretty good kick start and summary for the hows and whys.

I just read a post about GraphQL, and because the headline and all the article contains so much excitment and passion for the topic I read it until the end.

If I tell you who gave the answer you will run off and read it, so I don't and expect you to be interested enough in following the link to the answer.

sales pitch in railsstart-tutorial to make me buy into it #scnr

I was fighting a little bit with getting Michael Feather's delta-flora to run, but made it finally. My starter level of ruby knowledge made it not much simpler to get it to run :). But in the end I succeeded doing the following steps.

I found this repo, which seems not to be the newest, but one (if not the only one) which provides some ways of refactoring for ruby.

A very good talk by Jim Weirich, where he shows how to pull the meat, the actual business logic out of a rails app to make it testable in a fast manner concludes with a very interesting idea.

I know that the calling of functions can be quite noise-less, no parantheses and commas. But it also leaves me baffled at times. I can't get my head around this one either.

Emily Bache in her talk "Catch Dancing Ponies — Try Approval Testing" makes me balance my attitude where I try to prevent intergration tests, finding the right amount is the thing to do, I guess. Using this TextTest seems to be one way.

One method three different return types

Don't promisify fs.exists since this does not play by the rules of node style callback params, where the first one should be err and then data. It seems this does return only the data, which promisify understands as an error and does throw right away. Instead do what the node js docs suggest too and use fs.access instead, like so: promisify(fs.access)(aPath, fs.R_OK). See it in action [here in the cosmowiki].

I had been fighting for the last years, always again to make WebStorm run all my tests the way I want. I moved tests into the src folder then back into a tests folder. The latter is painful, since I have to keep the structures of two folders in sync that way, which is just inefficient, especially when I refactor so much, which I think is simply necessary and the right thing to do.

Since lots of things changed in babel6, it has become a platform there is some stuff you need to do to set up your project to use babel6. All is best described in "The Six Things You Need To Know About Babel 6".

Lots of links to further reading on design patterns and a good short introduction on why they are important. http://codebetter.com/jeremymiller/2005/09/01/learning-about-design-patterns/

My laziness actually pulls me strongly towards #noEstimates. I guess it's because the "no" means I have less work to do. Which I could kind of back up with the argument Robert Weissgraeber gives at the beginning of his talk, which is that we should remove all unnecessary work, all waste.

I am about to probably hit some RoR ground and I am already preparing myself, by listening to Uncle Bob

Uncle Bob nicely shows the parallels between accountants and TDD. One value gets put on the asset side and the other on the liability side, they add up to be 0. And then he questions why accountants meet their deadlines, even though they do things twice. Accountants do this for five hundred years, its a "law". We still need to get there with TDD, but we are on the best way and I second that and try to do my part with the JSCodeRetreat.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TfZmuS01CNs

From The Clean Code Talks this is a very good one by Misko Hevery where he is talking us out of using IFs, or at least trying to explain what IFs actually mean in code. And how we can better cater for those cases using polymorphism and how this also enables us to test better.

This edition has links about Constructing a URL, React, Journeymanship, Mutation Testing and 15 links under "Various".

C# has a way better expression for what we write in JavaScript like so obj.method && obj.method() and in C# you can do obj?.method() which is pretty slick I think. See this video (in german) for a short explaination.

In the paper "Design Patterns for Sorting", the internals of how to implement a decoupled version of a sorting algorithm is described. It also shows that the complexity of something like a quicksort is not necessarily high, which should remove the fear of just trying out to implement it.
Maybe that's a good idea for a kata, that might go into the katas repo.

RethinkDB is a topic that I had been investing some time into, because I tried to figure out which DB to use for cosmowiki. What convinced me about: it is a DB which offers the best of both worlds, the NoSQL world (schema "freedom") and SQL DB's relational data. RethinkDB has joins built-in as one of the core features. Besides built-in joins it claims to have a very simple scale out mechanism and almost magic, transparent fail-over since version 2.1.

My pet project ES6 Katas is a playground for learning, if you look in the repo you see lots of things moving around and changes made. Most of it is because I try to apply new learnings and try to get to a structure that really is what I consider good software. Lots of new bits of information I learn I try to apply there or at least play around with it and figure out what's a better way to do things. This often might end up in a forth and back of things and in not being able to decide what is right, and it looks like nothing moves forward, but that's just on the surface.

Unfortunately I missed Franziska's session at SoCraTes 2015 on this topic, but fortunately she wrote about it, make sure to also read through her commits backwards, of course :). Very nice and readable! An article "Kickstart your next project with a Walking Skeleton" she referred to, that explains the process too. While reading more and more of the [c2 wiki] I am asking myself where is the difference to a spike which Kent Beck defined as

In this talk, Uncle Bob starts to set the context for why our industry has a hard time catching up with the speed and also why it is so important that we do spend more time on mindfully constructing software. It's worth spending those 1,5h watching this talk, or less if you 2x the video speed :).

Just five items, one link and comments to Reginald Braithwaite's "Invent the future" and four others.

A long article by @RonJeffries about "overcoming the estimation obsession".

The first section has some links on crafting, development, tools and below 8 more links on JavaScript, mainly ES6.

Wikipedia says about cohesion, it refers to the degree to which the elements of a module belong together.
And about coupling it says how closely connected two routines or modules are.

Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasnt happened yet

On the famous c2 wiki find "Alan Kay On Messaging". His words are from the year 1998 and still so true. And I am only close to the beginning of really understanding. But I have to, as usual, extract some of the key points for me. Make sure to read the entire message anyways, it's really very short!

browser field in npm's package.json

I have been titled as a Sandi Metz fanboy, I am :). I use "send to" and "plays the role" since I read her book poodr.

Pharo - object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment

The new dojo? I started with dojo about 10 years ago, or so. Now I see reapp which seems to be the same as dojo, lots of widgets, just around react and transferred 10 years ahead and to mobile.
Good stuff? Or not?

With typeslab.com you can write poster like text.

Another pearl by @KevlinHenney in his Functional Programming You Already Know is his explaination of why we actually should leave out prefixes to our functions, such as get and set.

@KevlinHenney is always worth watching, so there is Functional Programming You Already Know by him. I would like to extract this one piece where he explains decoupling in a great way, I think.

Nothing to add to this post

surge.sh - gh-pages.next?

I am sure my uxebu-partner @Tobias posted this link in our internal flowdock (never used it? do it now! it's Slack in better). @Tobias knows all the tools.

Another tool I have to look at!? Just found via this article.

A nice read about DVCSes, let me mention here the two things I like best.

I first heard @bodil talk at the 2014 craftconf in Budapest where I saw her presentation where she was live coding in at least 10 languages on stage.

How to be a great software developer is a looong read, but it's worth reading, since it contains lots of truths.

I think this is a collection of funny accidents that I have to remember, might come in handy for a next slide set.

Any browser project should have a look at DOMPurify at least, if not apply it right away. This might not be what you want to apply right away, but maybe it triggers you to learn more about this field, when security issues hit you it might be too late.

For TDDBin I was just looking for all the icons to use on the website, icons from github, trello and twitter to embed them. And I found out that the collection of those images/graphics are called brand assets. Next time you search for them, don't use the term logo, use "brand assets".

This is a great talk by @KevlinHenney

It's not additional synthesis, as I would interpret the headline first, but it's pretty hard core cool what is possible in the browser already.

Not sure if I will ever get bash right, but little helpers like this explaining how "if" works are always helpful (to me).

I wanted to just push my source code to github's master branch and all the deployment after that shall be automatic. Every dev-op reading this will say "yeah sure, wtf?".

I don't get mocha to build with browserify, I always get

A Coding Dojo with @XaV1uzz doing the Kata Mars Rover and another one where he shows how to refactor the bowling kata to patterns.

As often as I look for this, I need to write it down. For example for my fork of github:dropping-spray, which got inspired by this tweet and the following discussion.

This is a very nice interview (video) with JB Rainsberger and Corey Haines, two of the people I closely follow and try to learn from as much as I can.

If you want to dive into cookies, here is the RFC6265. I was looking around for some decent cookie libraries. There seem to be some of them.

is a post by Adrian Bolboaca

I don't know why shelljs hasn't found me earlier :(

I asked myself what branch rebase refers to. The one I want to rebase on or the one I want to rebase from?

Links about naming things

Linked in the comments of this I found another great article, which I just have to quote.

I was about to write a "Handler" class. But I remembered that the "er" classes are not so good.

a talk by Chad Fowler

There is always more to learn about any topic, also about SOLID.

Refactor to functional

I read it first in my personal trending twitter search, then I saw it on hacker news and I pulled the repo and being intrigued by the minimal size, compared to react and polymer I thought I try out the demo, didn't work. So I looked a the code, very opinionated. My conclusion after having spent about just 1h on it I summed up in this tweet.

I have to read this, I just want to parse the data a bit and I fail. I smell that I don't get the concept fully yet, or that I am using it in a different way than it's meant.

Feature Injection is a business analysis process framework

JSON with CoffeeScript flavor

In order to keep all your meta data of your project in one place and only create files that actually just copy those data you can use projectz where you maintain data like title, description, author(s), badges, ... in one CSON file and with a special markup you can update fill in the templates files like README, package.json, ...

Complexity is outside the code

Martin Fowler named interactive or more online consumable slides infodeck, writes about it here and he is building a frontend for it which you can feed via XML.

Martin Fowler lists the kinds of refactoring, the reasons why we refactor code, in his infodeck.

found on stackoverflow

The webdriver API is here

Myth - a simpler alternative to all the CSS transformers out there?

Transducers(.js)

Very useful and right-away applicable insights into refactoring legacy code. Seems the VJUG has lot's good content.

The introduction to Reactive Programming you've been missing

I came across paxos more often lately. The first time was at a meetup group "Papers we love" there was a meetup in December about paxos.

Lately they don't turn out so good, or is it my blurred vision?

I really appreciate the things I learnt from Erik Meijer, but I am not so sure I can follow all his opinions.

As I just found in the docs metalsmith, which again uses the package metalsmith-markdown which in again uses the package marked describes in the readme that is also supports github flavored markdown. (I was actually just looking for how to strikeout things :)).

Mocks Aren't Stubs

Watch the author of poodr describing how to solve the problem of mocks and real code running out of sync! (And lots of goodies about testing and stuff.) Watch it twice, it's worth it :)

My lack of knowledge and understanding and knowing it scares me most

Servo is an experimental browser engine for modern multi-core hardware written in an experimental memory safe language called Rust. Maybe the future Firefox engine?

IDEs are awesome, but sometimes in my way and setting up test runners sometimes defeats the purpose of being fast with tests, which also means having feedback constantly and continuously.

I expected my new 15" Retina MacBook Pro to just blow my mind in terms of speed. But it didn't ... until now I am pretty disappointed. So I finally did some cleanup this weekend that promises to speed up, I am hoping.

I never knew which is the right markdown syntax, I took the five minutes to find out now I know, it seems to be this one here. At least following the link chain that lead me from metalsmith, which I use here to create this site to the markdown syntax.

I found it always painful to only update the gh-pages branch for deploying to a custom domain, an easy solution is pushing a subdirectory to gh-pages branch.

The answer on stackoverflow and also a more linux focused one on linuxedevcenter.com as given as reference in the article.