The blog of dlaa.me

A few days ago, I posted a response to a question I get asked about open-source project management. Here we go again - this time the topic is dependency versioning. WHAT IS A PACKAGE DEPENDENC...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/versionpinning

I maintain a few open source projects and get asked some of the same questions from time to time. I wrote the explanation below in August of 2023 and posted it as a GitHub Gist ; I am capturing ...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/shrinkwrap

It's "Connect season" again at Microsoft and I thought it might be useful to address something managers see pretty regularly: reluctance by their direct reports to fill out the required "paperwor...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/connects

As someone who likes to make backups of all my data , storing things "in the cloud" is a little concerning because I have no idea how well that data is backed up. So I try to periodically save co...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/notesbackup

The New York Times Crossword app includes a daily puzzle called "Spelling Bee" . The challenge is to make as many four-or-more letter words from a set of seven letters as you can. Each word must...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/spellingbee

I stumbled across a programming challenge while looking for info on UglifyJS . It's called A little JavaScript problem , though I you can do it in any language. I will summarize the problem here,...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/rangemapreverseforeach

From time to time, discussions of a markdownlint rule come up where the popularity of one of the rules is questioned. There are about 45 rules right now , so there's a lot of room for debate abo...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/markdownlintanalyzeconfig

About 5 years ago, Igor Shubovych and I discussed the idea of writing a CLI for markdownlint . I wasn't ready at the time, so Igor created markdownlint-cli and it has been a tremendous help for...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/markdownlintcli2

In October of 2017, an issue was opened in the markdownlint repository on GitHub asking for the ability to automatically fix rule violations. (Background: markdownlint is a Node.js style checke...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/markdownlintfixinfo

I wrote and shared MouseButtonClicker almost 12 years ago. It's a simple Windows utility to automatically click the mouse button for you. You can read about why that's interesting and how the pro...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/mousebuttonclicker

Since the beginning of the year, I've been doing all my OSS project development on a Raspberry Pi 4 running Raspberry Pi OS (née Raspbian). It's not as powerful a machine as my Intel-based des...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/raspberrypi

I happened across another coding puzzle recently that caught my interest. (If you're curious, here is a link to the puzzle I discussed a few weeks ago about implementing a weird kind of addition ...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/collinearpoints

A few days ago, Brent Simmons published a thoughtful blog post about one aspect of programming interviews. As someone who conducts interviews regularly for work, the topic is of interest to me. R...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/codingchallenges

A few months ago, I dashed out a JavaScript function to efficiently generate a random (version 4) UUID per RFC 4122 . This was inspired by code I saw for the same purpose that was NOT especially ...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/generaterandomuuid

I've been a happy user of the nodeunit test harness for a long time, but it was deprecated a few years ago. Recently, I went looking for a similar Node.js test harness to replace it. I prefer s...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/tapeplayer

One way I learn about new technologies is by using them. Sometimes I have a compelling scenario that yearns for a creative solution. Other times I don't. This was one of those times... So I creat...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/colr

Almost 5 years ago, I moved my blog (and website) from a hosted environment to a Node.js implementation of my own creation. At the time, I was new to Node and this was a great way to learn . Tha...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/newerblog

I'm always looking for new ways to develop code. My latest adventure was writing a script to update contact photos on iOS for a prettier experience in the Messages app conversation list. The sc...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/updatecontactimages

> I've been looking into Twitter alternatives Mastodon and Micro.blog > recently. I couldn't find a good comparison of the two services, so > I created one and put it ...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/twitteralternatives

Like most people, I take lots of photos. Like many people, I save them in the highest-quality format (often RAW ). Like some people, I edit those pictures on a desktop computer. Support for RAW...

https://dlaa.me/blog/post/converttojpeg