So you've come to a point where you want to build nice CLIs. There's a few different options for building CLI's. My two favorites are oclif and commander.js. I tend toward leaning to commander, unless I know I'm building a super big app. However, I've really enjoyed building smaller CLIs with commander recently.

So, I previously blogged about how we hosted CraftCMS on Heroku. When we built the marketing site for Quala the twig templates were built for maximum authoring flexibility at the cost of some TTFB problems. We knew this going into the project. In an ideal world we would use GatsbyJS to build the frontend, but we very limited in time. When we went live, we saw a dramatic improvement to First Contentful paint, but a huge decrease to Time To First Byte, averaging at 1.3 seconds.

So, incase you are unfamiliar, there is a meta tag called <meta name="theme-color" content="..."> that is used to change the color of the navbar on desktop safari, mobile safari, and mobile chrome. If you don't set a value these browsers tend to find a color that match the site to the best of their ability. However, sometimes even setting the value can cause the site to look ugly.

I remember when (Accelerated Mobile Pages) first came out, and it was very restrictive and weird. I think this ultimately hurt the AMP Brand Beyond this, several companies have built AMP experiences which haven't always been the best experience. I do however think AMP pages always load extremely fast. A lot of that is just the constraints of AMP. Last night I put my blog posts on AMP for a laugh, and it was much easier than I thought it would be.

So I've been using monorepos for some time, and recently I've gotten a lot of questions about how to host them on Heroku. I figured I'd give you the simple guide. There are two basic scenarios. The root of your git repo has your yarn/npm workspace, or you have a folder inside of a gitrepo you wish to use.

Turborepo is a tool that came across my virtual desk recently. Monorepo develoment has been around for a long time. This is a strategy where all of your code remains in one repository regardless of services. A lot of people use monorepo's even for microservices. The huge upside is to keep everything in one place, which allows for development efficiency, such as grepping an entire codebase for specific keywords. A quick example would be a top level directory which has child directories that each contain an npm package, unlike publishing these packages, you access them locally as though they were published.

For many of us a JS workspace is the simplest way to structure code for future growth while providing very quick iterations. Incase you are unfamiliar, several technologies exist such as yarn workspaces, lerna, npm workspaces, etc. That can seamlessly stitch npm packages on disk as though they were published to a private NPM registry. This allows for fast iteration inside of a single git repo, while allowing a future where these dependencies could be abstracted.

I've been getting back into building scrappy little web apps for my friends. On top of this, I recently joined a startup and getting away from Enterprise class software has made me make a huge mind-shift. In the recent past when I wanted to build apps I was thinking Kubernetes, Helm Charts, etc. However, in small app, and startup land reducing the barriers to ship is very important.

I've been working at CarGurus.com for the last 2 years or so. One of the biggest journeys we've been undertaking is to take accessibility far more seriously. However with an engineering team way into the triple digits it gets harder and harder to scale accessibility knowledge.

As more and more of the world is getting online, a larger part of the internet community is using the internet on lower powered devices. Making websites fast is becoming paramount. Here are 5 tips to improving you web page's performance

I've had a lot of people ask me about my choice of editors, and plugins. A while back I switched to vscode for all my programming work, for both front and back end. In the past I've blogged about the best plugins for visual studio as a backend dev, but I thought I'd give you a more front-end angle

So many people know me as a very performance focused engineer, and as someone that cares about perf I've always been a bit embarrassed about this blog. In actual fact this blog as it sits now is fast by most people's standards. I got a new job in July, and well I work with an absolute mad lad that is making me feel pretty embarrassed with his 900ms page load times. So I've decided to build my own blog engine, and compete against him.

In the battle of performance one tool constantly rains supreme, the all powerful profiler! In javascript land chrome has a pretty awesome profiler, but every-time I looked into our react perf issues I was always hit by a slow function called anonymous function

So incase you havn't been following me. I joined Cargurus in July. At cargurus we're currently working on our mobile web experience written in react, redux and reselect. As our implementation grew so did our time to first paint.

Ok so recently I was chatting on a slack, mostly sharing cat pictures, when I realized the CarGurus slack account did not have a /cat command. I knew immediately, this had to change!

So I'm currently sitting on a plane at the moment. A recent project I started on was a travel guide where I live. Being on a plane without wifi for a long time is a quick wakeup to me how much I rely on the internet to code.

Here we are, its 2017 dotnet core is out, and finally dotnet has a proper cli. In a previous post we explored the new cli. In short you can use the dotnet cli to build, test, package, and publish projects. However sometimes just using the cli is not enough. Sometimes, you land in a place where you have many projects to compile, test, and package.

When Visual studio 2015 launched, I wrote a blog post titled Resharper without Resharper. This was clearly aimed at giving people the ability in 2015 to divorce themselves from the very expensive product. In writing the post however, I didn't realize people would just want a low down on cool vs2015 extensions.

Ok so I've been in the alexa skills market recently, and obviously amazon wants you to use AWS Lambda for your skills. If you are like me, you have a ton of stuff in azure app service (the PaaS of azure). Azure app service supports nodejs, java, python, and of course .net. The two sdk's amazon ships (node, java) do not tie in with a web stack, and are obviously thought of as being used with Lambda.

Now that dotnet core tools have been released I thought it would be good to look into the dotnet cli. This is a new command line interface to build, manage, compile and run dotnet core based applications

Today marks the release of Visual Studio 2017, and with it the final release of the tools for dotnet core. This means as of today you can build, test, and deploy an application completely supported by microsoft. Not just the runtimes, but the tooling as well. The CLI for dotnet core has been finalized, and its awesome. The csproj system has been revitalized. New csproj's can be created, and are fully compatible with the old. Visual studio 2017 has finally released. This is probably the greatest version of visual studio ever created. Finally VS has gone from a slow, archaic editor, to a fast moving IDE. An IDE with a DevOps-First Cloud-First mentality. An IDE ready to tackle today's modern challenges.

tl;dr view this gist

So its 2016, and we are still making console apps/cli's. In fact I would say there has been a surge in popularity of these types of tools. I think we have come to the realization that buttons on forms are not automatable, and that the command line doesn't have to be scary.

I recently started writing an app in dotnet core, which is the new runtime for dotnet. In the past I have often used command line parser, but as of this writing it does not support core.

I was really lost trying to find an arguments parsing library when I realized the dotnet cli was open sourced.

After much struggle, failing to bingle. I started ripping through the Entity Framework, and dotnet cli's code hoping to find a gem. Thats when I stumbled across a diamond. You see many dotnet projects use Microsft.Extension.CommandLineUtils to do cli parsing.

dotnet CLI is currently in RC2, and while the train is fast approaching RTM, most tools are still catching up. dotnet seems to have a documented cli based install for every platform except the good ol windows. That being said getting a windows based install/build is possible.

For a while now I have been playing with rails, and rack webapps. If you are not familiar with these, they are webservers created in ruby. One of the features I ran into during my journey into ruby land is Turbolinks. Incase you are not familiar, Turbolinks is basically a simplified pjax, with a lot of flexibility. When you click on a link in a page with turbolinks, the link action is hijacked and the target page is loaded via ajax. The result of the ajax call (which is presumed to be html) will replace the document of the body tag. At the end of the day its a technology to load your server side pages via ajax.

I recently ported my ghost blog to hexo, and it was pretty easy.

Checkout my other hexo blogs:

• Hosting hexo in Azure webapps
• Why I moved from Ghost to Hexo

Getting Started with hexo

To get started with hexo run the following commands:

• npm install -g hexo-cli
• hexo init
• npm install

This will drop many files, and folders. The primary one we are going to talk about is the _config.yml. You will want to start by filling out the _config.yml file. Name your blog, give a descripton, etc.

Porting your blogs over

To get your data over you will need to go to this url: http://yourblog.com/ghost/settings/labs/ and click the export button. Place the json file at the root of your hexo blog, then run.

• npm install hexo-migrator-ghost --save
• hexo migrate ghost NameOfYourExportFile.json

Your posts should drop in the posts folder, but the tags will need fixing. Open atom (or another editor that can do find replace in a directory) and replace tags: | with tags: in all the files.

Now that it is done we need to fix the paths to your images. Download your images (if you are using azure you can get them via ftp), and place the folder in the source directory.

Now run hexo server, browse to port 4000. Your blogs should appear.

Backward compat. urls

We need to make some modifications to make sure the urls are backward compatible.

Set the tag_dir to tag, in ghost the path to tags is /tag.

if your post urls were just /Title then put :title/ in the permalink setting. Otherwise adjust the urls for the proper date format.

RSS

You will want to have an rss feed. You will want to npm install hexo-generator-feed --save

You can then add the following to your config.yml

feed:
    type: rss2
    path: rss
    limit: 0

If you were like me you registered your ghost rss feed to /rssinstead of /rss.xml. I have no perfect answer to fix this, but I used azure's Url redirect to redirect /rss to /rss.xml.

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <rewrite>
          <rules>
              <rule name="SpecificRewrite" stopProcessing="true">
                  <match url="^rss$" />
                  <action type="Rewrite" url="public/rss.xml" />
              </rule>
          </rules>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

If you are using github pages you can use the jekyll-redirect-from gem.

So I know I do a lot of blogging about C#, or JavaScript, but I actually do a lot of nodejs apps as well as other languages. For a very long time I have not found the stack of my dreams. .NET has always been very close but there were multiple things about the app model that I was not a fan of. I think NancyFX has been the closest framework to my dreams in .NET land.

Around a year ago I joined a new team where I work, and this team was starting to undertake a full rewrite of their code. We were going from a full c#/mvc app to a tiny c# api, and a very big SPA.

Early one one of the huge things to do was to make sure that our JavaScript error logs could land in our Log4Net infrastructure. I started to write something to do just that, and as I was coding I quickly realized this was less trivial that it sounded. We had something internal we could use, but it was tied to a lot of other code that we didn't want to pull in.

I started Bingling around and I stumbled across jsnlog. JSN log lets you quickly wire up your client side logs to your server. I have been able to get PR's into the code base and the guy behind it has been very friendly to me when I have had questions.

Growing up I always wanted to work with electronics, and as soon as I could work I was working with a computer. I currently work as a Software Engineer at Vistaprint. I work on the Gallery team, which is an agile development team that works on our platform to display products in a gallery (hence the name). Before I joined the gallery team, I spent most of my career doing ops things.

I was exploring around github, and I stumbled upon an interesting project called Miniblog which was a lightweight blog engine written in c#. The thing that immediately stood out to me was the lack of a .csproj file.

As I dug around the code I realized this was not a Web App, which most of us were familiar with, but a websites project. I then suddenly realized that the whole thing only used razor!

I am a huge fan of Nancyfx because its much more lightweight than the MVC framework created at Microsoft. To say the least I am a massive fan of small tools, and micro frameworks. So when I realized this whole thing was powered by razor only I was immediately impressed.

I decided to dig around on the internet to see if anyone else was talking about this. I found out quickly that it has been possible for some time, but I didn't find many references about it.

The one thing that bummed me out about the Miniblog example was that it was not a web app. You can use nuget packages will websites, but you cannot make references to other projects in the solution. This was a problem for me, and unlike websites, web app's are precompiled which reduces application startup time.

In this last year I have done much more JavaScript development than I have before. The landscape, and tools have exploded over the last few years. Gone are the days of JQuery widgets, and come forth have advanced virtual dom libraries, JavaScript servers, and multiple package managers. Along with new language features.

I have used Linode for quite a long time now. My blog was hosted on linode, as was my StarBound server. My linode was the CentOS Pet I always wanted. Full of manual Fail2Ban configs, I make sure I fed my VPS every day. I even used cowsay to give me a cool message from my pet every login.

The major reason I moved my things away from Linode, was not the devops story itself. I could have stuck with linode, and used chef or something to manage my former friend. I decided to host everything in Azure Web apps. Now before I give you my long ramblings why I like azure; I must tell you. I put everything in azure, because my MSDN gave me free credits. There was no huge scientific analysis behind this. The simple fact that I got free money in Azure was the only reason why I started using it.

click here for vs2017

Resharper has long dominated the c# landscape as the tool of tools. Roslyn shipping with VS 2015, the quick actions light bulb, and the community analyzers, all combine to produce a resharper-like experience.

Where I work .NET rules supreme. Personally I really don't care that much about the technology so long as it supports really good workflows. One of my major issues with nuget is that is very opinionated.

Ok so to give you all some background. I always write my data access with a repository pattern in c#. Now I often use dapper, however I'd guess this problem would also apply with Entity framework.

Code quality tooling has become a bigger, and bigger industry. Tools like Resharper, and stylecop have been telling us how bad us human beings are at developing code.

The one problem I have always had with these tools is they dont go above and beyond to help you understand your code at a higher level.

• Day One

Day 2 was full of math based paranoia, math, and puppet(s)....

SquishIt is a content bundler and minification tool. The github documentation contains exaples how to install and use it, and a sample application is provided. However I had some issues getting it to work with razor so I figured I would share these pain points with you.

Capturing client side errors in my opinion is really good. For starters you can troubleshoot your client side implementation, but you can also make sure a js change did not break certain pages.

Below is a really simple, yet effective way to capture errors. Eventually you may want to implement something more advanced, but this will get you out of the gate.

NodeBB is forum software written on Node.js

The official installation instructions are on github, but the documentation is for Ubuntu.

To install on CentOS follow these instructions.

The Parse Function

The parse function allows you to do some pre-processing of the data sent from the server before the model is created. Parse should return an object containing the values that will make up this models attribues. This is called after the fetch command has recieved the data, but before the response is put into the model. The example below parses dates to local time before adding them to the model using moment.