JavaScript

I love dynamically typed languages as much as the next person. They let us make ergonomic API calls like this: import httpx # Sync call for simplicity r = httpx.get("https://dummyjson.com/products/1").json() print(r["id"], r["title"], r["description"]) or this: fetch("https://dummyjson.com/products/1") .then((res) => res.json()) .then((json) => console.log(json.id, json.type, json.description)); In both cases, running the snippets will return: 1 'iPhone 9' 'An apple mobile which is nothing like apple' Unless you’ve worked with a statically typed language that enforces more constraints, it’s hard to appreciate how incredibly convenient it is to be able to call and use an API endpoint without having to deal with types or knowing anything about its payload structure. You can treat the API response as a black box and deal with everything in runtime. ...

Recently, I purchased a domain for this blog and migrated the content from rednafi.github.io1 to rednafi.com2. This turned out to be a much bigger hassle than I originally thought it’d be, mostly because, despite setting redirection for almost all the URLs from the previous domain to the new one and submitting the new sitemap.xml3 to the Search Console, Google kept indexing the older domain. To make things worse, the search engine selected the previous domain as canonical, and no amount of manual requests were changing the status in the last 30 days. Strangely, I didn’t encounter this issue with Bing, as it reindexed the new site within a week after I submitted the sitemap file via their webmaster panel. ...

Cloudflare absolutely nailed the serverless function DX with Cloudflare Workers1. However, I feel like it’s yet to receive widespread popularity like AWS Lambda since as of now, the service only offers a single runtime—JavaScript. But if you can look past that big folly, it’s a delightful piece of tech to work with. I’ve been building small tools with it for a couple of years but never got around to writing about the immense productivity boost it usually gives me whenever I need to quickly build and deploy a self-contained service. ...

This weekend, I was working on a fun project that required a fixed-time job scheduler to run a curl command at a future timestamp. I was aiming to find the simplest solution that could just get the job done. I’ve also been exploring Google Bard1 recently and wanted to see how it stacks up against other LLM tools like ChatGPT, BingChat, or Anthropic’s Claude in terms of resolving programming queries. ...

I recently gave my blog1 a fresh new look and decided it was time to spruce up my GitHub profile’s2 landing page as well. GitHub has a special3 way of treating the README.md file of your repo, displaying its content as the landing page for your profile. My goal was to showcase a brief introduction about myself and my work, along with a list of the five most recent articles on my blog. Additionally, I wanted to ensure that the article list stayed up to date. ...

Whenever I plan to build something, I spend 90% of my time researching and figuring out the idiosyncrasies of the tools that I decide to use for the project. LLM tools like ChatGPT has helped me immensely in that regard. I’m taking on more tangential side projects because they’re no longer as time-consuming as they used to be and provide me with an immense amount of joy and learning opportunities. While LLM interfaces like ChatGPT may hallucinate, confabulate, and confidently give you misleading information, they also allow you to avoid starting from scratch when you decide to work on something. Personally, this benefits me enough to keep language models in my tool belt and use them to churn out more exploratory work at a much faster pace. ...