December 2020

I have been using tundra as template engine for this site. And I am thankful for it, but it's time to move on. I mainly chose it because it is tiny, has no dependencies and it has the features I was looking for. It just does the things I am used to from django-like template engines not well enough, misses a tiny useful feature here and there. This does especially hurt, when I want to reuse HTML sceletons, tags, HTML snippets or functions to generate them. That is where tundra stops working. Knowing the code a bit I also think I have a feeling that getting it there would be quite some work.

I am working on the <pico-viewport-stats> element examples. The web site is a simple HTML page, which I stripped down to the bare minimum. A bit too much!

HTML is getting more and more semantic it seems. I am seriously wondering what this means for building things like a blog, like this one here. It becomes more and more reasonable to write pure HTML, instead of markdown, doesn't it? Maybe I am just late and just learned about some HTML elements now. What a shame.

Until today I was just a copy+paster of nginx configs. I thought I had my share back when I learned and undestood apache very well, so why learn another one. But my nextcloud setup and letsencrypt that comes with it has an nginx "bundled", so I would like to understand things a bit better. So I started reading the docs and will take my notes here.

I want to get my nextcloud setup to run using docker-compose, and to start with I need a linux machine with docker running at start up. This is task #1, it looks like this blog post has the answers how to do it.

If you are struggling with React Native's KeyboardAvoidingView and it does not behave as you expect, the most probable reason is some flex layout issue. I highly recommend reading KeyboardAvoidingView not working properly? Check your Flexbox Layout first by Nick Yang.

Minify all *.js Files

When I was involved in page speed optimization, in my last job, I was always fighting for measuring in two ways. One using tools like webpagetest and lighthouse and two measuring the real user's experience, on the site. There are even names for it, I didn't know, until now:

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 a collection of things I sometimes need when working with React Native and my external Android device.

React Native has a component Pressable. Used like so <Pressable>clickable thing</Pressable>. It is a more abstract way to build a button or something that a user can click. The component Pressable has one Android-specific attribute android_ripple, which allows to customize the UX of the ripple effect. I think the visual feedback the ripple effect provides is very user-friendly, it indicates if a click was detected. So I am investing time in making it work well, but it's not that easy. Let me share my learnings.