Category Archives: development

Using reactive streams on serverless with cyclejs, xstream and Azure Functions

Posted on October 22, 2016 by Steve

[ Update 2016-10-23 the code is now in the cyclejs community repo] During development of my latest SaaS product, Brian, I’ve settled on a couple of key architectural decisions. For the Frontend I’m using Reactive programming (RP) with streams and … Continue reading →

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Is the web getting less webby and will serverless make it worse?

Posted on September 13, 2016 by Steve

[Title inspired by a quote from Scott Hanselman on Serverless with Azure Functions ‘It’s as close to “cloudy” as The Cloud can get’] There’s some big changes happening in web land that are fuelled by rapid app framework developments and … Continue reading →

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Free and easy HTTPS certificates with CDN with Kloudsec

Posted on March 19, 2016 by Steve

HTTPS is a ‘must have’ for any web service, SPA or progressive web application and so it is naturally high on my list of things to get to grips with. As a first step for the Brian project I’m creating … Continue reading →

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More on portable npm scripts

Posted on March 17, 2016 by Steve

Following on from my earlier post on the topic of writing portable npm scripts, here’s a few more useful tips. [UPDATE 2016/03/31: Bash for Windows was announced at Microsoft Build 2016. This exciting feature will allow running of Linux npm … Continue reading →

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Writing portable npm build scripts

Posted on December 15, 2015 by Steve

tl;dr; Developers need to install and build Javascript NPM modules on Windows as well as *nix. With a little care this is possible without using heavyweights tools like Grunt and Gulp . Modern HTML development usually includes a build and deploy process similar … Continue reading →

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Dealing with Windows text line endings in git

Posted on December 3, 2015 by Steve

Text line endings on Windows: Still painful after all these years Once upon a time, in the days of Microsoft MS-DOS development one of main pain points and source of bugs was the distinction between text and binary files. When … Continue reading →

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Working with Windows native code from node.js

Posted on October 19, 2015 by Steve

[UPDATE 02 Feb 2016: While this post discusses Win32 access, here’s an interesting option for UWP access from JXCore that should eventually work with nodejs when the Microsoft PR for Chakra is merged.] While the node.js ecosystem provides an amazing … Continue reading →

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Flashing Firefox OS onto a Flame with Windows

Posted on October 18, 2014 by Steve

Since being involved in the Mozilla Tablet Contribution Program I’ve seen community members often asked about flashing and building on Windows. This seems to be a something of a FAQ for both the ‘flatfish’ tablet and ‘flame’ reference phone, and … Continue reading →

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Flashing Mozilla Firefox OS Flame Phone on Windows

Posted on September 26, 2014 by Steve

tl;dr the shallow_flash.sh file used to flash Firefox OS nightly builds t to phones such as the Flame now works on Cygwin on Windows. The reason for previous failure and the solution highlight a difference between Linux and Windows. Mozilla’s … Continue reading →

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Sending emails with PHP on cheap hosting

Posted on December 9, 2013 by Steve

Many cheap or free share hosting services block the PHP mail() function so it silently does nothing. For example, I just added a contact form to a small WordPress based web site for a friend but it didn’t work as … Continue reading →

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