No more grief when working with pesky openapi.yaml files — I recently discovered the IDE plugin Indent Rainbow whilst trying to solve a frustration I’d been experiencing when working with openapi files. With one of my clients, I’m working with a large openapi.yaml file. This file defines our API and describes each of our endpoints in minute detail - request…

Oh, heck, where has the time gone? — It’s been just over a year since I decided to take the plunge and start freelancing. Prior to doing this, I had been working full time in various companies in London as a software engineer, i.e., a bog-standard 9 to 5. Freelancing is definitely a different way of working which…

And become a productivity guru 💯 — Background For one of the client projects that I’m working on, we have multiple deployment environments up and running. At the last count, we had five — local, development, qa, staging and production. However, with so many environments, I was finding it really difficult to differentiate between each of them as…

Get creative with dummy texts — We’ve all heard of ‘Lorem ipsum’ — the dummy text used as a placeholder for real content. This allows a designer or developer to concentrate on the design of a web page — without it looking empty or using distracting real copy. It has its roots in Latin — though…

And use it to copy over or duplicate your database — A database dump is essentially a backup of a database — be it the structure of the database and/or the data held within it. It consists of a bunch of SQL commands which enable you to recreate your database from scratch. Generating a database dump has multiple uses — such…

And turn your database into a smart spreadsheet — What is NocoDB? NocoDB enables you to interact with your relational databases online (and locally) — acting essentially like a spreadsheet. Once set up and deployed, you can easily grant access to other people and control their permissions. Why did I want to use it? With one of my clients I would often get a similar vein of question —…

And all the ways I’d write it differently today — For my first ever programming project (discounting some terrible first websites 😜) I wrote a bowling command line application (CLI). I built it using JavaScript as the language, Node.js as the runtime environment and MySQL as the database to store information about player scores. The application enables one or more…