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Introducing the Intersection Observer V2 ⛌

Mon, 22 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

As I mentioned in one of my other posts, Intersection Observer will report when an element appears in the viewport, after applying all overflow and CSS clips. However, there is no way currently to find out whether an item is being put on top of this element, or some filter is applied to it which may alter or obscure the element’s display.

Context

Intersection Observer is now widely used by developers especially since Safari added support a while back and it’s now available in all major browsers. If you want to be notified when an element appears in the viewport such as an image, if you want to lazy load it you can use this API. In its most basic form the code looks like this:

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const logIfIsInViewPort = (entries) => {
  for (const entry of entries) {
    if (entry.isIntersecting) {
      console.log(entry);
    }
  }
};

const observer = new IntersectionObserver(logIfIsInViewPort);
observer.observe(document.querySelector('.element-selector'));

The problem

As great as it sounds, this API is not perfect. For example it can’t tell you whether or not an element is covered by another content (which is called occluded), or if a filter is applied to it to hide or obscure it’s content (such as opacity, filter, transform, etc.).

This can lead to dangerous situations where some people might do fraud or abuse the web. So Intersection Observer V2 was born to prevent these types of scenarios.

Intersection Observer V2

As I said, the primary motivation for this API is to prevent those situations where a fraud might be possible, or people could abuse the user’s privacy in a way especially if the said content is put in an iframe.

Intersection Observer V2 works by tracking the actual visibility of the element, just like the end user would see it. By passing an option to it’s constructor, the collection of IntersectionObserverEntry will contain a new boolean called isVisible.

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const handler = (changes) => {
  for(const change in changes) {
    // feature detection
    if(typeof change.isVisible !== 'undefined') {
      if(change.isIntersecting && change.isVisible) {
        console.log(`Visible since ${change.time}`);
      } else {
        // fallback to v1 if not supported
        change.isVisible = true;
      }
    }
  }
}

const observer = new IntersectionObserver(handler, {
  threshold: [1.0],  
  trackVisibility: true, // this will give you the isVisible property
  delay: 100
});

observer.observe(document.querySelector('.target-element-selector'));

Additional parameters

The object which is passed in the constructor has a few properties:

threshold: A list of thresholds which will trigger a callback.
trackVisibility: A boolean indicating whether or not to track the visibility of the element.
delay: A number defining the minimum delay in milliseconds between notification for a given object.

💡 Note that tracking visibility is an expensive operation and should only be used when necessary. The performance implications can cause more harm than good if abused.

How does it determine visibility?

Determining whether the element is visible or not is not as simple as you might think. Based on the spec:

If false is passed as the value of trackVisibility, the element is considered visible.
If the target element has an effective transformation matrix other than 2D then the element is considered invisible.
If the target element or any of its children, has an effective capacity other than 1.0, then it’s considered invisible.
If the target element or any of its children has a filter applied, then it’s considered invisible.
If the browser cannot guarantee the target is fully visible, then it’s considered invisible.

What’s the catch?

This is in a draft state and still work in progress. Apart from Chrome, none of the other major browsers currently support it.

Summary

Although this hasn’t been implemented in most browsers yet, it’s a great tool to prevent some of the common attacks such as clickjacking or likejacking, or cursorjacking.

Chrome - where did save sessions go? 🤔

Wed, 17 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I remember a while back (not sure how long), Chrome had the ability to save all tabs when you closed the browser regardless of whether it was by accident or not. But they removed that ability and now if you close the window you will lose the tabs.

What now?

Well there are still some ways you can save your current tabs and open them next time you open a new Chrome window.

1. Small hack but works (most times 😁)

Open your task manager and kill the Chrome’s task. It’s a dirty hack but it works. When you open Chrome next time it asks you do you want to restore the last session and when you click the button, it will open all of your previously open tabs.

So first kill the task:

Later when you open a new window:

2. Save them as bookmarks

Yes, you read right. You can save all open tabs as bookmarks and open them all later when you come back. Simply press Ctrl + Shift + d in windows or ⌘ + Shift + d in Mac to save all your open tabs in a new bookmark folder.

Later on when you come back and open a new window, you can right click on the folder you created previously and select open all tabs:

⚠️ This technique won’t help you if your browser crashes for some reason.

3. I am too tired to do all of that

If you don’t want to open your task manager, or don’t want to use bookmarks, don’t worry. There are some extensions which can help you with that.

Tab Session Manager

Tab Session Manager is a Chrome extension which allows you to do:

Save and restore windows and tabs
Manage sessions with name and tags
Auto save when window is closed
Auto save at regular intervals
Import and export sessions
Compatibility with Firefox extension
Cloud sync

It also has Microsoft Edge and Firefox versions which is great.

Session Buddy

Session Buddy is a popular extension with more than 24K installs. It will do all of the above for you automatically in one place. Whether your browser crashes or you choose to close it manually.

Summary

Hope this helps you from a possible disaster if you have millions of tabs open at a time. If you are a tab person, check out my other article on managing your tabs in Chrome here. Until next time, 👋🏽.

Chrome - Arrange your tabs with tab groups 😍

Mon, 15 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

If you’re one of those people with so many tabs open than you can manage, read on.

The why

For those of you who have many tabs open all at the same time and are struggling to keep a tab on your tabs, the time has come to get a bit more organised using this new feature in Chrome called tab groups.

The whole purpose has been to help users keep their tabs organised and easier to find them in their sea of open tabs.

How can I do it?

Simply right click your tab and select Add tab to tab group option. Then there will be a dot right before your tab. Click on the dot, a pop up will open in which you can select a colour for your tab group, and name your group.

If you are clicking on an existing group, you will have the following options in addition:

Add a new tab to the group
Ungroup tabs in a group
Close group
Move the group to a new window
Send feedback if you have any

I’ve demonstrated this in below video:

But I don’t see the option

If you can’t see the option, don’t worry, just go to chrome://flags, then search for tab groups and enable the option. It’s still experimental, but you can use it now.

Summary

Hope this will help you to keep a tab on your tabs and till next time 👋🏽.

Did you know about scroll to text? 📜

Sun, 14 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

You probably have used fragments in links to point a link to a part of your page such as a heading. This technique is used in table of content for example and it’s a common pattern.

Background

To extend the current support for scrolling to an anchor element in a page, the W3C have proposed a solution which basically adds the ability to link to a DOM element with id, or textual content on a page to make it easier for browsers to understand what the users are interested and scroll there when they visit the page. In addition to make it visually easier to follow, they have added the highlight to the text so that users will know where to look at on first sight.

Scroll to Text Fragment

So that’s how Scroll to Text Fragment was born. It has been shipped to Chrome and Microsoft Edge called Scroll to Text Fragment which allows you to link to a specific text on a page, using a fragment provided in the URL. When the page is loaded, the browser highlights the text and scrolls it into view.

This is the generic syntax:

#:~:text=[prefix-,]textStart[,textEnd][,-suffix]
          context  |-------match-----|  context

💡 Square brackets indicate an optional parameter.

Here is an example:

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<a href="https://yashints.dev/#:~:text=Meet&text=Yas">
  Click to go to a specific portion of a page
</a>

And you can test it live by clicking here.

If you want to target an exact text:

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<a href="https://yashints.dev/#:~:text=almond%20croissant%20addict">
  Click to go to a specific portion of a page
</a>

Try it here.

You can also add an end text in which case the text directive refers to a range of text on the page.

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<a href="https://yashints.dev/#:~:text=Although,web%20developer">
  Click to go to a specific portion of a page
</a>

Try it here.

Use cases

Search engines

When search engines will link to pages which contain relevant information to the query, they will scroll and highlight that so the user will find it easier.

Citation / Reference links

Links are sometimes used as citations on some pages where the author wishes to enforce a claim by pointing to a reference such as Wikipedia. These reference pages can contains large chunks of text and finding the information can be difficult. So having the ability to scroll to that section and highlight it is really encouraging to readers to follow the links.

Sometimes you want to share a piece of text to someone for example by email or on social media, it’s really helpful to be able to link directly to the specific section rather than the whole page.

Nowadays people share short snippets directly in tweets or create screenshots which can contain more text and post those. With this they won’t need to do that since links can be more meaningful.

Summary

And that’s how the web is moving towards a better place where users are the centre of attention for us developers and the more we know how to make their lives easier the more they trust us to take care of it for them.

Enjoy your evening and till next time 👋🏽.

Links and JavaScript 🔗

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I see some occasions where web developers who are a bit less familiar with accessibility use links incorrectly in different forms. So I thought let’s write a quick guide on Links in JavaScript apps.

Background

It’s safe to assume that anyone who’s used the web have seen them. They take users from one page to another either within the same application or to an external website. There were really hot when they were introduced back in 1966 by a team led by Douglas Engelbart.

In the early 1980s Ben Shneiderman, a computer scientist at the University of Maryland, with his graduate student Dan Ostroff were preparing a videodisk exhibit for a museum. It was then where they used a caption that had all the information and users could click on it to see the photo associated with it.

At first, this discovery was called embedded menu but that term was quickly replaced by hyperlink. Tim Berners-Lee cited Shneiderman’s hyperlink work in his spring 1989 manifesto for what would become the World Wide Web.

Back then, this feature was super hot and it still is. People use it without even thinking about it and it’s become a natural part of the web.

Enough background, tell me what’s this all about

Let’s review what they do:

As mentioned before they allow users to navigate between pages within a site or to an external one.
And more importantly they help search engines and bots to find resources and going from one page to another by following the links. Think of this as a giant maze where they need to blindly follow the links to discover stuff.
And last, the crawlers use them to understand the architecture of a site and the type of content they have. It’s a critical part of their decision making when assigning a page to a specific topic.

But how do you make a link?

`a` tag with `href`

Turns out it’s not as straightforward as one might think. The simplest way to put a link on your site is to use a good old <a> tag with a URL which it points to in the href attribute.

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<a href="/elsewhere">A good link, YES ╰(*°▽°*)╯</a>

`a` tag with `href` and event handler

For those with special circumstances, they might sprinkle a little bit of JavaScript on top and use an event handler to navigate the user programmatically:

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<a href="/elsewhere" onclick="goTo('elsewhere')">Okay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯</a>

This is fine as the link stays functional and you can upgrade the functionality using JavaScript.

`a` tag without `href`

But some people decide to remove the href attribute. This is not a good idea because you now prevented crawlers to find out where this link goes to:

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<a onclick="goTo('elsewhere')">Please don't ╯︿╰</a>

`a` tag with `href` but no link

In other occasions, people use the href attribute without a URL or with a pseudo URL:

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<a href="javascript:goTo('elsewhere')">Seriously? (⊙_⊙)？</a>

This is even worse than the previous case as it just confuses the hell out of every crawler out there.

using `button`

You might think it’s a good idea to use a button to navigate the user, but let me tell you, that’s not a good idea either. The rule of thumb is that if the purpose is to do something on the current page, it could be a button. But if it’s takes users to another page or to an external site, it should be a link.

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<button onclick="goTo('elsewhere')">But why? <( _ _ )> </button>

any other HTML element

It’s worth noting that you shouldn’t simulate a link using any other HTML element and add a click handler with JavaScript:

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<div onclick="goTo('elsewhere')">NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!! (#`O′)</div>

This not only wrong for crawlers, but also messes up the screen readers and causes a lot of trouble for people with any vision impairment. So please just use a link with a proper URL.

What is a proper URL? I hear you ask

You saw we ruled out the pseudo URLs like javascript:doSomething(), but let’s take a look at URLs more closely.

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http://example.com/old-school-url

example.com/page#section

A URL contains these elements:

A protocol (optional), which defines the protocol to be used for navigation such as http, or https.
It also has a host, example.com or yashints.dev. A host is a name that one or some computers respond to. Usually it points to an IP address.
It has a path to specific asset on that computer such as an HTML file, an image, CSS file or a font. But that’s not always the case, sometimes the path is handled via JavaScript and is used to replace part of the content in a page. This technique is called Single Page Application or SPA.
Some URLs might contain another part such the second example above. That part which comes after the # sign, is called a fragment identifier. By itself a fragment identifier is not a piece of content. It just points to a specific part in the content such as a header.

💡 Because fragments are not suppose to point to different content, crawlers ignore them altogether. This means for single page applications where they use fragment like routing, crawlers don’t follow them and that’s why people use techniques such as server side rendering or SSR to allow crawlers become aware of the page’s content.

Summary

To sum it all up:

Use proper link markup, a tag with href attribute.
Do not use other HTML elements to navigate users.
Do not omit the href attribute on an anchor tag.
And last but not least, do not use fragment identifiers to load different content in SPAs if you can.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and thanks for drooping by. Until next article, Ta.

Microsoft Build 2020 highlights 🔣

Sat, 23 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Microsoft Build went on fully online and it came with some really exciting announcements. For us developers some of these can bring massive efficiencies. So let’s see what’s on offer.

WSL2

Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (aka WSL2) is here with a ton of awesome features allowing developers to have a really great experience working in a side by side Windows/Linux environment.

No Hyper-V image is needed to run docker containers
GPU Support
100% system call compatibility
Increased I/O performance

Linux GUI apps in Windows

This was really an exciting announcements. Microsoft is adding a full Linux Kernel to its Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 (aka WSL2) with GUI support and GPU acceleration.

This will be enabled without us having to use X11 forwarding and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments alongside regular Windows apps.

Image from Microsoft’s official blog

Winget, Microsoft’s package manager

This is probably one of those controversial topics where people will say: oh another package manager. But Microsoft believes they have considered all options and this decision was made with lots of considerations.

You can install winget via it’s App Installer package. You can also join their insider program which contains the winget by default.

You can easily add your package to this package manager by following their instructions on their GitHub repository and create a PR containing your package’s information and link to download.

Just so you know how excited people are, there are already 228 open PR’s and 541 closed. Of course not all of those PR’s have been packages, but even so, it’s a lot of packages submitted already.

Microsoft’s new PowerToys Run launcher

Microsoft just released a new Spotlight-like launcher app for Windows 10. This launcher is part of a series of apps which come with the PowerToys tool set.

It’s still preview, but you can install it today. Jump into this page and download the msi file, then install it.

Or if you like to do it a bit more fancy, just run this in your terminal:

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WinGet install powertoys

Remember this requires winget to be installed to work.

Once installed, press Alt + Space and you’ll get this beautiful launcher:

💡 You need to run it manually for the first time for now. This will get fixed once they release their GA version.

Alongside PowerToys Run, Microsoft also released a Keyboard Manager PowerToy which allows you to define shortcuts for your favourite actions, or remap keys like replacing A with B. Check out the other cool tools in their GitHub page.

Project Reunion

Microsoft announced Project Reunion, an effort to bring win32 desktop apps and its Universal Windows Platform (UWP) apps close together. From their page:

Project Reunion makes it easier to build a great Windows app by providing a unified platform for new and existing Win32 and UWP apps. It will unify access to existing Win32 and UWP APIs and make them available decoupled from the OS, via tools like NuGet.

Fluid framework

Microsoft is adding a new type of document to it’s Office suite called Fluid Framework. This allows multiple people to collaborate on a single document with fast speed and offers multiple types of elements like tables, graphs and lists in one place rather than having to use multiple apps for different reasons.

Apart from aforementioned features, it comes with ability to @mention someone to notify them of something, plus activity feeds for each document if you want to be notified of the changes.

And to emphasise their focus in bringing more to open source, they are making this framework open too.

Project Bonsai

Project Bonsai is Microsoft’s effort in creating a platform which lets developers and engineers create autonomous systems. It is a machine teaching service to create and optimize intelligence for industrial control systems. Through machine teaching, subject matter experts without an AI background can break down their expertise into steps and tasks that are imparted to AI agents.

Static Web Apps

Static Web Apps offers static Web applications powered by storage for hosting and Azure Functions as backend APIs. They also have the full pipeline on GitHub using GitHub actions to let you deploy your apps really fast.

These are some of the key features:

Free web hosting for static content like HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and images.
Integrated API support provided by Azure Functions.
First-party GitHub integration where repository changes trigger builds and deployments.
Globally distributed static content, putting content closer to your users.
Free SSL certificates, which are automatically renewed.
Custom domains to provide branded customizations to your app.
Seamless security model with a reverse-proxy when calling APIs, which requires no CORS configuration.
Authentication provider integrations with Azure Active Directory, Facebook, Google, GitHub, and Twitter.
Customizable authorization role definition and assignments.
Back-end routing rules enabling full control over the content and routes you serve.
Generated staging versions powered by pull requests enabling preview versions of your site before publishing.

Image from Microsoft blog

Others

There were dozens of other stuff announced, but here are some of the developer related ones:

Blazer WASM is released
MAUI makes mobile app development easier
Visual Studio is becoming Visual Studio Codespaces
GitHub Codespaces brings amazing developer experience right from your browser
GitHub Discussions for brainstorming feature ideas, help new users
Code scanning and secret scanning on GitHub on private repositories
GitHub Private Instances – a fully managed environment for enterprises
GitHub Actions for Azure are now integrated within: Visual Studio Code, Azure CLI, and the Azure Portal. This makes it easier to deploy from GitHub to Azure!

Hope this has given you some pointers to go play with some of these amazing features and till next time 👋🏽.

Swapping variables in JavaScript 🔁

Fri, 15 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

There may be many different reasons why you’d want to swap two variables be it just changing two item’s location in an array or when sorting collections. The traditional way is just define a new variable, assign one value to it, put one of the items in the old place, then put the temp variable back in the new place. But my question is, is that the only way?

Traditionally

The old way of swapping two variables is done like below:

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let x = "Yas";
let y = "Hints";

let temp = x;
x = y;
y = temp;

console.log(x); // Hints
console.log(y); // Yas

There is nothing wrong with this approach unless you’re doing it frequently.

Without the temp variable

There is another way you could swap two variables without any temp variable. But this only works with numbers:

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let x = 10;
let y = 20;

x = x + y;
y = x - y
x = x - y;

console.log(x); // 20
console.log(y); // 10

This works two, but now we’re doing three additional operations to save some space, so you need to be careful when you use this one. Another thing to consider with this approach is the chance of having overflows with additions or subtractions (sum should be less than Number.MAX_SAFE_INTEGER which is 9007199254740991).

Bitwise `XOR`

Similar to above approach, you could use XOR to swap the two variables, but this also works only on numbers:

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let x = 3;
let y = 5;

x = x ^ y;
y = x ^ y;
x = x ^ y;

console.log(x); // 5
console.log(y); // 3

If you’re not familiar with XOR, it works on bits. When you perform XOR two bits, it evaluates to 1 if they are different, and evaluates to 0 if they’re the same.

x	y	XOR
0	0	0
1	1	0
0	1	1
1	0	1

So let’s see why this works.

x = x ^ y
y = y ^ x when x = (x ^ y), so the y = (x ^ y) ^ y which equals to x ^ (y ^ y) = x ^ 0 = x. So now our y is the old x.
x = x ^ y when according to our first step x is not x ^ y, and so x = (x ^ y) ^ x = y ^ (x ^ x) = y ^ 0 = y.

Is this better than the previous one, probably faster, but still limited to numbers only.

ES6 destructuring

Destructuring is an ES6 feature which is used a lot in many of the modern frameworks. In its core, it allows you to store array elements in variables.

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let x;
let y;

[x, y] = [1, 2, 3];

console.log(x); // 1
console.log(y); // 2

Now considering how we can use this to swap the elements of an array:

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let x = "Yas";
let y = "Hints";

[x, y] = [y , x];

console.log(x); // Hints
console.log(y); // Yas

This method is much elegant, but still creates two arrays to perform the swapping. So the efficiency might not be that good if you’re swapping many elements.

Summary

Just because a feature is available, doesn’t mean you should use it in every situation. Think about what is the most important factor in the solution you’re implementing. If it’s space, choose one which doesn’t take much, although it’s a bit slower.

If the memory doesn’t matter but speed is important, choose accordingly. But definitely consider the situation before deciding on your approach.

All you need to know about string in JavaScript 🧵

Mon, 11 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

String is one of the primitive types in JavaScript and we use it in every project we work on no matter what. But how familiar are you with the methods available in JavaScript to work with a string variable? Let’s have a quick look at those in this article.

Introduction

A primitive value such as “Yas” doesn’t have any methods or properties, mainly because it’s not an object. But with JavaScript, methods and properties are available because it treats primitive values as objects.

Let’s have a look at the simplest method you have most definitely used:

String length

The length property returns the length of a string:

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const alphabet = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";
console.log(alphabet.length); // 26

Pay attention on how length property is available on a primitive type. Not all languages are following the same principle when dealing with such behaviour though. In PHP we have helper functions:

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<?php
echo strlen("ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ");
?>

Finding a text in string

There are a few methods to help you find a sub-string in a String. Let’s go through them and see what are their differences:

`indexOf`

The indexOf method returns the index of the first occurrence of a specified text in a string:

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const txt = "Can you find Yas in 'dryasdust'?";
console.log(txt.indexOf('yas')); // 23

There a few points you need to know here. First, JavaScript counts positions from zero, and second, indexOf is case sensitive.

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const txt = "Can you find Yas in 'dryasdust'?";
console.log(txt.indexOf('Yas')); // 13

This method returns -1 if it can’t find the text:

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const txt = "There is no 0 in 11";
console.log(txt.indexOf('zero')); // -1

You can pass a second argument to let the indexOf know where to start looking for the text:

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const txt = "We have SQL and no-SQL databases!";
console.log(txt.indexOf('SQl', 10)); // 19

`lastIndexOf`

As the name suggests, lastIndexOf is used to find the last occurrence of a text in a string.

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const txt = "Can you find Jam in 'JamStack'?";
console.log(txt.indexOf('Jam')); // 21

This method also returns -1 if it can’t find the text you’re looking for, and takes a second parameter to start the search. However, since this method starts the search backward, the second parameter acts as cutting the string from that position to the end:

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const txt = "Can you find Jam in 'JamStack'?";
console.log(txt.lastIndexOf('Jam', 6)); // -1

`search`

The search method also searches the string for a text and returns the first occurrence of the text:

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const txt = "Can you find Jam in 'JamStack'?";
console.log(txt.search('Jam')); // 13

You might think that search and indexOf are the same. However, there are differences in these two:

search doesn’t accept any other parameter
indexOf cannot take powerful search values such as regular expressions

That’s right, search will accept regex as argument as well, for example, to perform a case insensitive search you might want to use search instead of indexOf:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(str.search(/jam/i)); // 9

console.log(txt.indexOf('jam')); // -1

You can also search for non usual patterns, e.g. finding any character that is not a word or whitespace:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.search(/[^\w\s]/g)); // 24

`endsWith`

The endsWith methods checks whether the string ends with the specified text. It returns true if it does, and false if it doesn’t:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.endsWith("Stack!")); // true

💡 This method is case sensitive.

`startsWith`

Similar to endsWith, this method checks whether a string starts with the specified text. This method is also case sensitive:

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const txt = "JamStack's got Jam";
console.log(txt.startsWith("JamStack")); // true

`includes`

includes allows you to check whether or not a string contains a specified text and is case sensitive:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.includes("in")); // true
console.log(txt.includes("Jam")); // true
console.log(txt.includes("jam")); // false

`localeCompare`

localeCompare will compare two strings in the current locale. It returns a negative number indicating if the reference string occurs before the compare string, positive if it occurs after, and 0 if they are equivalent:

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const a = 'réservé'; 
const b = 'RESERVE';
console.log(a.localeCompare(b)); // 1
console.log(a.localeCompare(b, 'en', { sensitivity: 'base' })); // 0

Extracting sub-strings

There are three methods which allow you to extract part of a string.

`slice`

slice extracts part of a string and returns the extracted part in a new string. It takes two arguments, start position, and end position (the end position will not be included).

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.slice(9, 12)); // Jam

If you pass a negative value, it will start from the end of the string:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.slice(-16, -13)); // Jam

You can omit the second parameter, and it will extract from start to the end of the string:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.slice(16)); // JamStack!

`substring`

The substring method is similar to slice but it won’t accept negative indexes:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.substring(16)); // JamStack!
console.log(txt.substring(9, 12)); // Jam

`substr`

substr method is similar to slice with one difference that the second parameter is the length of the text to be extracted and not the position:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.substr(9, 3)); // Jam

And if you omit the second parameter, it will extract to the end of the string. Furthermore, if the index you pass is negative, it will count from the end:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.substr(-9)); // JamStack!

`split`

Although this method is not directly used for extracting a text value, it’s good for splitting the string value by a character and return an array of substrings:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
const words = txt.split(' ');
console.log(words[4]); // JamStack!

A few points regarding this method:

The simplest case is a single character, also referred to as delimiter. For example you can split a tab separated value (TSV) by using str.split("\t").
If the separator contains multiple characters, that entire string needs to be found.
If the separator cannot be found, the return value is an array with one element containing the whole string.
If the separator appears at the beginning or end of the array, it still counts. Meaning the return value is an array with a string value, and one empty string item either at the start or at the end of the array.
If you pass an empty string " as the separator, it splits the string into single UTF-16 characters.

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
console.log(txt.split('Jam')); // ["There is ", " in ", "Stack!"]
console.log(txt.split('test')); // ["There is Jam in JamStack!"]
console.log(txt.split('There')); // ["", " is Jam in JamStack!"]
console.log(txt.split('')); // ["T", "h", "e", "r", "e", " ", "i", "s", " ", "J", "a", "m", " ", "i", "n", " ", "J", "a", "m", "S", "t", "a", "c", "k", "!"]

Replacing string content

The replace method, as the name suggests, replaces a part of the string with the provided text:

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const txt = "Who's awesome!";
console.log(txt.replace("Who's", "You're")); // You're awesome!

💡 This method doesn’t change the original string, it returns a new one.

By default, it’s case sensitive and just replaces the first match:

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const txt = "This 🐶 is a good 🐶!";
console.log(txt.replace("This", "That")); // This 🐶 is a good 🐶!
console.log(txt.replace("🐶", "🐕‍🦺")); // This 🐕‍🦺 is a good 🐶!

To do a case insensitive replace or to replace all matches, you could use regex:

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const txt = "This 🐶 is a good 🐶!";
console.log(txt.replace(/THIS/i, "That")); // That 🐶 is a good 🐶!
console.log(txt.replace(/🐶/g, "🐩")); // This 🐩 is a good 🐩!

Case conversion

To convert a string to uppercase or lowercase you can use toUpperCase and toLowerCase respectively:

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const txt = "What's up bro!";
console.log(txt.toLowerCase()); // what's up bro!
console.log(txt.toUpperCase()); // WHAT'S UP BRO!

We also have toLocaleLowerCase and toLocaleUpperCase methods to convert according to user’s current locale:

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const dotted = 'İstanbul';
console.log(`EN-US: ${dotted.toLocaleLowerCase('en-US')}`); // "i̇stanbul"
console.log(`TR: ${dotted.toLocaleLowerCase('tr')}`); // "İSTANBUL"

Concatenation

You can use concat to join two strings together (like + operator):

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let message = "Hello" + " " + "World!";
console.log(message); // Hello World!
message = "Hello".concat(" ", "World!");
console.log(message); // Hello World!

Trimming and padding

`trim`

To remove whitespace from both sides of a string value, you can use the trim function:

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let message = "     Hello World!     ";
console.log(message.trim()); // "Hello World!"

💡 Whitespace in this context is all the whitespace characters (space, tab, no-break space, etc.).

`padStart`

The padStart method adds a given string at the start of the original string (multiple times, if needed), until the resulting string reaches the given length.

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const str1 = '5';
console.log(str1.padStart(6, '0')); // 000005

`padEnd`

The opposite of padStart is the padEnd.

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const txt = 'OMG Jam';
console.log(txt.padEnd(25, '.')); // OMG Jam..................
console.log('OMG Jam'.padEnd(10)); // "OMG Jam   "

Getting the string value

There are two methods where you can get the value of a string in JavaScript. You might say, Yas are you crazy, we already have the value in the variable. But remember that I said JavaScript treats a string variable as an object under the hood, so these methods come from the Object.prototype.

`valueOf`

The valueOf returns the primitive value of an object. For string values, JavaScript does it for you under the hood whenever you invoke a method which needs the primitive value. But you can also call this method to get it:

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const txt = "Yas";
console.log(txt.valueOf()); // "Yas"

`toString`

Similar to the above method, toString is used to return the value of a string.

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const stringObj = new String('Yas');
console.log(stringObj); // String {"Yas"}

console.log(stringObj.toString()); // "Yas"

`repeat`

This method is my personal favourite. You can pass a number to the repeat method and it returns your string repeated by that number. It’s really good if you want to have some long text generated for testing purposes:

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const txt = "Lorem ipsum faked,";
console.log(txt.repeat(5)); // Lorem ipsum faked,Lorem ipsum faked,Lorem ipsum faked,Lorem ipsum faked,Lorem ipsum faked,

Character methods

`charAt`

The charAt returns a new string consisting of the single UTF-16 code unit which is located at the index specified:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
const index = 4;
console.log(`The character at index ${index} is ${txt.charAt(index)}`); // "The character at index 4 is r"

`charCodeAt`

The charCodeAt returns an integer between 0 and 65535 representing the UTF-16 code unit at the given index:

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const txt = "There is Jam in JamStack!";
const index = 4;
console.log(`The character code at index ${index} is ${txt.charCodeAt(index)}`); //The character code at index 4 is 101

`codePointAt`

The codePointAt method returns a non negative integer representing the Unicode point value of the specified index:

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const icons = '☃★♲';
console.log(icons.codePointAt(1)); // "9733" 
'\uD800\uDC00'.codePointAt(0)  // 65536

`normalize`

And last, but not least, the normalize method returns the Unicode normalisation form of a string:

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const myAlias = '\u0059\u0061\u0073\u0068\u0069\u006e\u0074\u0073';
console.log(`${myAlias}`); // Yashints

Summary

Hope you enjoyed reading this and learnt a few tricks which could help you at what you do day to day. And let’s finish this article with a joke:

What do you call it when Wilhelm II makes a string of bad puns? 👉🏽 A Kaiser roll

Let's sort with JavaScript 🔢

Sun, 03 May 2020 00:00:00 GMT

There are many different sorting algorithms out there such as quick sort, merge sort, insertion sort, bubble sort, etc., that could be useful in our day to day life, writing code which gets shipped to production. Knowing all of them is not necessary, but if you have a basic understanding of each one, you can decide on the most efficient one for your scenario.

Introduction

Choosing a suboptimal sort algorithm could lead to longer completion time, code complexity, or worse, a program that crashes half way through an operation.

We use sorting algorithms everyday, Array.sort is one of the sort algorithms which is used to sort an array in ascending order. But that is not a solution for every scenario.

When choosing a sorting algorithm, we need to consider the complexity, or the number of operations performed (usually mentioned as O(x), which is read Big O of x) and also number of swaps along the way. So let’s review and implement some of the most used ones together and learn about their complexity.

Bubble sort

The way bubble sort works is very simple. You compare the first item of the collection with the second. If the first one is bigger, then swap the two. If not, move to the second item, and repeat the same. We keep repeating this until we reach the end of the list.

So far we have bubbled up the biggest item of the list to the far right side in its position. Now we repeat this for the rest of the items again until the list is sorted.

Let’s see this in action:

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function bubbleSort(list) {
  let len = list.length;

  for(let i = len - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
    for(let j = 1; j <= i; j++) {
      if(list[j - 1] > list[j]) {
        let temp = list[j - 1];
        list[j - 1] = list[j];
        list[j] = temp;
      }    
    }  
  }

  return list;
}

bubbleSort([7, 5, 2, 3, 9, 6]); // [2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9]

As you can see this algorithm is not optimal, in fact it is one of the heaviest in terms of number of operations in worst-case scenarios. But in terms of swaps, it’s one of the best since it sorts in place.

The complexity of bubble sort in worst-case is O(n²), read as big O of n square, where n is the number of items in the collection.

However, in a best case scenario (already sorted collections), it will be O(n) with O(1) swaps.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n²) swaps
Best-case performance	O(n) comparisons
	O(1) swaps
Average-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n²) swaps

Selection sort

Selection sort is really simple like bubble sort. We go through the list, find the index of the lowest element, then swap the lowest element with the first one. Now that the first item is sorted, we repeat this for all remaining elements.

Let’s see this in action:

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function selectionSort(list) {
  let minIndex, temp,
      len = list.length;
  
  for(let i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    minIndex = i;
    for(let j = i+1; j < len; j++) {
      if(list[j] < list[minIndex]) {
        minIndex = j;
      }
    }

    temp = list[i];
    list[i] = list[minIndex];
    list[minIndex] = temp;
  }

  return list;
}

selectionSort([11, 25, 12, 22, 64]); //[11, 12, 22, 25, 64]

Let’s see how the list is sorted in each iteration in the above example:

Sorted list	Unsorted sublist	Lowest elements
[]	[11, 25, 12, 22, 64]	11
[11]	[25, 12, 22, 64]	12
[11, 12]	[25, 22, 64]	22
[11, 12, 22]	[25, 64]	25
[11, 12, 22, 25]	[64]	64
[11, 12, 22, 25, 64]	[]

In terms of complexity, this algorithm remains the same regardless of which scenario we’re facing. Which is O(n²) for comparisons, and O(n) swaps. But if you look at the code, it’s self explanatory and simple and sometimes we just want exactly that. In terms or swaps, it’s less than bubble sort.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n) swaps
Best-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n) swaps
Average-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n) swaps

Insertion sort

This is like when I play cards and someone is handing me the them one by one. I usually put them in my hand in order as I receive them. Insertion sort builds the final list one item at a time. This means it’s less efficient for large lists relative to it’s competitors such as quick sort, or merge sort.

However, it provides several advantages:

Simple implementation (we’ll get there shortly).
Efficient for small data sets.
More efficient than bubble or selection sorts.
Adaptive, i.e. efficient for already sorted collections.
In place.
Online, can sort a list as it receives it.

Let’s see how it works in action:

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function insertionSort(list){
  let i, len = list.length, item, j;

  for(i = 1; i < len; i++){
    item = list[i];
    j = i;

    while(j > 0 && list[j-1] > item) {
      list[j] = list[j-1];
      j--;
   }

   list[j] = item;
  }

  return list;
}

In terms of complexity, it’s similar to bubble sort in worst and average cases with O(n²) for both comparisons and swaps. But in best case, it’s really efficient with O(n) comparisons and O(1) swaps.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n²) swaps
Best-case performance	O(n) comparisons
	O(1) swaps
Average-case performance	O(n²) comparisons
	O(n²) swaps

Merge sort

Merge sort is in the divide and conquer algorithms and is implemented with a recursive pattern. We break down the list into small pieces until you have one item in each piece. Then we merge them back together but will compare them and put the items in order.

It’s really easy to understand, but let’s see it in action:

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function mergeSort(list) {
   let len = list.length;
   if(len < 2)
      return list;
   let mid = Math.floor(len/2),
       left = list.slice(0,mid),
       right =list.slice(mid);
   
   return merge(mergeSort(left),mergeSort(right));
}

function merge(left, right) {
  let result = [],
      lLen = left.length,
      rLen = right.length,
      l = 0,
      r = 0;
  while(l < lLen && r < rLen) {
     if(left[l] < right[r]) {
       result.push(left[l++]);
     }
     else{
       result.push(right[r++]);
    }
  }  
  
  return result.concat(left.slice(l)).concat(right.slice(r));
}

Merge sort is much better in terms of complexity from previous algorithms. It takes O(n log n) operations to sort an array. In terms of memory needed, it’s O(n) total with O(n) auxiliary if we use array and O(1) if we use a linked list.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n log n)
Best-case performance	O(n log n)
Average-case performance	O(n log n)
Worst-case space	O(n) total, O(n) auxiliary with list, O(1) with linked list

Quick sort

Quick sort is similar to merge sort, with the difference that the we don’t split the collection in half. We choose a pivot point and split from there. Once we have chosen the pivot point, we put all smaller items to the left and all the larger items to the right of that.

That means that the pivot point itself is sorted now. We continue this for left and right side recursively until we have the full list sorted.

Choosing the pivot could be random, middle point, first, or last item of the list. There are many ways to do this each with their own pros and cons.

Let’s see this in action to better understand the difference:

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function quickSort(list, left, right) {
   let len = list.length, 
   pivot,
   partitionIndex;


  if(left < right) {
    pivot = right;
    partitionIndex = partition(list, pivot, left, right);
    
   //sort left and right
   quickSort(list, left, partitionIndex - 1);
   quickSort(list, partitionIndex + 1, right);
  }
  return list;
}

function partition(list, pivot, left, right) {
   let pivotValue = list[pivot],
       partitionIndex = left;

   for(let i = left; i < right; i++) {
    if(list[i] < pivotValue) {
      swap(list, i, partitionIndex);
      partitionIndex++;
    }
  }
  swap(list, right, partitionIndex);
  return partitionIndex;
}

function swap(list, i, j) {
   let temp = list[i];
   list[i] = list[j];
   list[j] = temp;
}

quickSort([11,8,14,3,6,2,7],0,6); 
//[2, 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 14]

As you can see, the more efficient the algorithm gets, the more complex the implementation will be. In terms of complexity, it’s worst than merge sort in worst-case, and equal in average and best.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n²)
Best-case performance	O(n log n) with simple partition, O(n) with three-way partition
Average-case performance	O(n log n)
Worst-case space	O(n) auxiliary

Heap sort

Heap sort is a comparison based sort, you can think of it as an improved version of selection sort. It divides it’s input into a sorted and an unsorted region, then iteratively shrinks the unsorted region by extracting the largest item and inserting it into the sorted region.

The unsorted region is kept in heap data structure to more quickly find the largest item in each step.

💡 Since there is no heap data structure in JavaScript, we can use an array to represent it.

That was a mouthful, so let’s see it in action:

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function heapSort(list) {
  let len = list.length;
  let i = Math.floor(len / 2 - 1);
  let j = len - 1;

  while(i >= 0) {
    heapify(list, len, i);

    i--;
  }

  while(k >= 0) {
    [list[0], list[k]] = [list[k], list[0]];

    heapify(list, k, 0);

    k--;
  }

  return list;
}

function heapify(list, len, i){   
  let largest = i;
  let left = i * 2 + 1;
  let right = left + 1;

  if(left < len && > list[left] > list[largest]) {
    largest = left;
  }

  if(right < len && list[right] > list[largest]) {
    largest = right;
  }

  if(largest != i) {
    [list[i], list[largest]] = [list[largest], list[i]];

    heapify(list, len, largest);
  }

  return list;
}

In the above code snippet, heapify function compares three elements, the parent, and two children. It then makes sure that they are in the correct order for a max heap since we’re building the heap from bottom up.

Case	Complexity
Worst-case performance	O(n log n)
Best-case performance	O(n log n) distinct keys, O(n) with equal keys
Average-case performance	O(n log n)
Worst-case space	O(n) total, O(1) auxiliary

Summary

You should have a good understanding of these sort algorithms by now. If not, I recommend going through them again and try to write a few examples with a pen and paper. Don’t worry if you have trouble understanding the more complex ones like heap sort. It’s completely OK as I had the same trouble initially. But with practice and trying to implement them I learnt them at the end.

There are many other sort algorithms out there, so feel free to explore them and compare the way they work with what you’ve learnt so far.

Thanks for reading and enjoy sorting your collections.

⚡ All the images in this post are pulled from the algorithm’s Wikipedia pages.

Have you ever thought about for loops? ➰

Fri, 24 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

Using a loop is almost a must in our day to day life. But have you ever thought what kind of loop should you use? Do you know the difference between enumerables and iterables? This article sheds some light in this space, so read on if you’re interested.

Background

Looping has seen quite a few changes from when I started programming. I remember using while loops and thinking wow, this is cool (I was printing starts on console using MS-DOS).

For loop is another way to iterate through a data structure which contains many items. But non of these methods iterate over the actual structure. They use a sequence, usually named i which mirrors the identifier for you.

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const fruits = ['🍉', '🍎', '🍌'];

for (let i = 0; i < fruits.length; i++) {
  console.log(fruits[i]);
}

// 🍉, 🍎, 🍌

Here i is an index which allows you to access the elements of fruits array and is not part of the array itself. But with progress on JavaScript towards more modern ways of programming, things have changes now. We have for...in, and for...of loops which use a different mechanism for going through items in a collection.

Concepts

Before we delve into these newer ways of iteration, we need to be on the same page around some concepts. So let’s go through them now:

Iterables: This is a kind of loop where we are performing a repetition. Meaning the same set of actions are performed on each item.
Enumerables: This is a kind of loop where we making mention of, or counting items one at a time. This means the collection’s elements can be distinctly identified and referenced.

That didn’t click for me at first, but after going through some examples, it finally made sense. If you consider a full pencil case, that’s an enumerable. When you line up at Aldi to pay, that line is an iterable. A wad of cash is an enumerable, whereas a row of keys on your keyboard is an iterable.

💡 In order for an object to be iterable, it MUST implement an @@iterator property which returns an iterator. An iterator object is one which has a next method which returns the next item in the collection. That’s why an object is not an iterable.

By now you should have started to see the pattern here. The best analogy I came across is:

😍 Enumerables are like rectangles whereas iterables are squares. This means all iterables are enumerables, however, not all enumerables are iterables.

`for...in`

So let’s start from enumerables. You can go through enumerables using for...in. The use case is mainly to go through key-value pairs in an object:

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const superCar = {
  make: 'Lamborghini',
  model: 'Veneno',
  year: '2020'
};

for (let key in superCar) {
  console.log(`${key} --> ${superCar[key]}`);
}

// make --> Lamborghini
// model --> Veneno
// year --> 2020

You can also use for...in to go through index values of an iterable like an array or a string:

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let fact = 'Lamborghini is the best!';

for (let index in fact) {
  console.log(`Index of ${fact[index]}: ${index}`);
}

// Index of L: 0
// Index of a: 1
// Index of m: 2
// Index of b: 3
// ...

💡 Beware that you can’t iterate on Symbol properties with for...in and that’s because Symbols are primitive data types that are always unique. They are generally used as private properties to avoid name clashes when inheritance is used.

Using `for...of`

This kind of loop is applicable to “iterable objects” meaning the item after of MUST be an iterable:

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const fruits = ['🍉', '🍎', '🍌'];

for (let fruit of fruits) {
  console.log(`${fruit} is delicious.`);
}

// 🍉 is delicious.
// 🍎 is delicious.
// 🍌 is delicious.

And again we can use it on strings, but with a slight difference:

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let fact = 'Yas';

for (let char of fact) {
  console.log(char);
}

// Y
// a
// s

Summary

We saw the difference between these two modern ways of looping through collections, let’s make more informed decisions as to use what where and write cleaner, more readable code 👊🏽.

Stay on top of performance with Lighthouse CI 🚦

Mon, 13 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

You’ve spent many hours trying to improve your web performance and have got it to a good speed. What happens next? How do you ensure it remains in good shape especially if you’re working in a team with diverse backgrounds and level of coding.

Web performance must be monitored

I truly believe web performance shouldn’t be an item in your backlog, rather part of acceptance criteria on each story. That said, having discipline is hard when it comes to web performance. Each member of the team should be aware of dos and don’ts so that they can right code which doesn’t add a few seconds to current page load time, or user’s interactivity with the page.

In order to do so, you need to constantly monitor the performance of your application and when is a better time to do it than your CI/CD pipeline or when creating a pull request to get the code merged in (it’s worth mentioning having a CI/CD pipeline is not necessary to have a high quality, well written and performing site).

In addition to all of that, your site performs differently from your localhost, so you need to ensure you’re testing close to your actual environment.

Lighthouse CI

Lighthouse CI is a set of commands that make continuously running, asserting, saving, and retrieving Lighthouse results as easy as possible.

This is a great tool which allows you to run audits on your code base using command line, and raise an alert when someone unintentionally downgrades the performance.

What to measure?

There are countless metrics on which we could focus on. Some are user centric like time to interact, some are resource centric such as the size of your JavaScript or CSS files. Lighthouse CI allows us to easily focus on the size of the files. You can create two types of budgets:

1- Number of given resource: This will help you to for example enforce having only 3 JavaScript and 1 CSS file. 2- Size of a given resource: This budget will enforce that a given resource is of certain size, e.g. only 500kb.

How does it know?

You’re probably wondering how does Lighthouse CI know what to measure and when to raise an alert. This **||is done via a JSON file which is usually named budget.json, but you can choose any name you prefer.

Performance budget

The content of this file is an array of objects representing the budgets for a path. The content will look like below if you only have one path to assert:

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[
  {
    "resourceSizes": [
      ...
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      ...
    ]
  }
]

Within the resourceSizes and resourceCounts arrays, you can add individual objects that specify the resourceType and its budget. The budget can be any positive integer and the resourceType can be any of the following:

Resource type	Description
script	JavaScript files
document	HTML documents
image	Images
stylesheet	CSS files
font	Webfonts
media	Other media
other	Any other resource which doesn’t match the above, e.g. data transfers over Websocket connections
third-party	All resources from a third-party domain
total	All resources combined

For example, the following file will set a 200Kb budget for all scripts, a 500Kb for all images, and a 500Kb for all other resources. Then it sets the total network requests to be 25.

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[
  {
    "resourceSizes": [
      {
        "resourceType": "script",
        "budget": 200
      },
      {
        "resourceType": "image",
        "budget": 500
      },
      {
        "resourceType": "total",
        "budget": 500
      }
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      {
        "resourceType": "total",
        "budget": 25
      }
    ]
  }
]

As of Lighthouse 5.3 you can add a path property to select which pages the budget should apply to. This is very handy because it allows you to have a centralised budget file for all your pages.

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[
  {
    "path":"/*",
    "resourceSizes": [
      ...
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      ...
    ]
  },
  {
    "path":"/blog",
    "resourceSizes": [
      ...
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      ...
    ]
  },
  {
    "path":"/contact",
    "resourceSizes": [
      ...
    ],
    "resourceCounts": [
      ...
    ]
  }
]

How should you choose your numbers?

Finding the performance budget is not an easy task since it will depend on your application’s structure and bundling style. However, you can use this useful tool called Performance Budget Calculator to have a starting point. You might have to run the tool multiple time to each to a point where you’d be happy with the result. You don’t want to be too aggressive and also too complacent either.

Using the CI locally

You can install the CI locally with:

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npm install -g @lhci/cli

It also has a dashboard which shows you the historical runs, compares reports and store their results.

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npm install @lhci/server

Before running the CI, you need to have a configuration file to tell the tool what to test and where to find the budget file (you could also pass those individually without a config file, but it’d be a pain):

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// lighthouserc.json
{
  "ci": {
    "collect": {
      "numberOfRuns": 2,
      "startServerCommand": "yarn serve",
      "url": "http://localhost:8080"
    },
    "preset": "lighthouse:recommended"
  }
}

Then you can run the tool on your local web server by first running:

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lhci autorun --config=./lighthouserc.json

and then:

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lhci assert --no-lighthouserc --budgetsFile=budget.json

And you will get a result similar to below based on your app’s performance:

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2 result(s) for http://localhost:8080/

  ×  resource-summary.script.size failure for maxNumericValue assertion
     Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small
     Documentation: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/budgets

        expected: <=102400
           found: 2416174
      all values: 2416174, 2416174


  ×  resource-summary.total.size failure for maxNumericValue assertion
     Keep request counts low and transfer sizes small
     Documentation: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/audits/budgets

        expected: <=512000
           found: 2437694
      all values: 2437694, 2437694

Assertion failed. Exiting with status code 1.

Using the tool on your PRs

I am focusing on GitHub using actions here. But you can apply this technique to Azure DevOps, CircleCI, TeamCity, or any other tool you’re using. For this to work you will need to have a GitHub flow in your git repository defined.

This article’s focus is not to teach you how to create a workflow, but here is the bare minimum you will need to have. Create a .yaml/.yml file in the .github/workflows folder, you can name it whatever you want. I usually name them after what’s their purpose, e.g. lighthouse.yml or lhci-performance-bot.yml.

But before we get to the content of our yaml file, let’s see what we need to do on each PR:

Pull down the code
Build the app
Deploy to a temporary site (I am using Netlify Preview here, but you can use others like staging slots on Azure App Service, etc)
Run Lighthouse CI on the site
Fail if the conditions are not met

For this to work, we need an application. So I just spun up a new Vue application using Vue CLI, then added my workflow to it and pushed it to a new GitHub repo.

Here is how my workflow looks like:

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name: Lighthouse CI

on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [master]

jobs:
  lighthouse:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Setup Node 12
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: 12.x
      - name: Yarn Install and Build
        run: |
          yarn
          yarn build
      
      - name: Waiting for 200 from the Netlify Preview
        uses: jakepartusch/wait-for-netlify-action@v1
        id: waitFor200
        with:
          site_name: "lighthouse-ci-pr"

      - name: Audit URLs using Lighthouse
        uses: treosh/lighthouse-ci-action@v2
        with:
          urls: |
            $DEPLOY_URL/
            $DEPLOY_URL/about
          runs: 3
          budgetPath: ./budget.json
        env:
          DEPLOY_URL: ${{ steps.waitFor200.outputs.url }}

What is happening is that I am just creating an action on each PR. In this action, we need to pull down the code, install node, run yarn and yarn build to build the application, wait for Netlify to deploy our PR into a preview site, then get the URL and inject it into the next step.

I’m just using wait-for-netlify-action, but it’s not that hard to implement this part. Then we will be using the lighthouse-ci-action to run our audit on the paths we have specified.

Notice I am not using a Lighthouse configuration file in this workflow because it’s not needed. You can pass the parameters directly to the action like I’ve done above. I am just auditing the home and about pages since I’ve only got these two pages.

You can pass as many URL’s to this as you like, but if there are many of the, it makes more sense to add the config file back.

💡 Remember to setup Netlify for your site and set it to create a deployment for every PR. Then get the site id and pass it to the wait-for-netlify-action action.

Pro tip: When you setup your Vue CLI generated application which is using Vue Router, the non default routes won’t work if the user types them in the browser URL bar and hits enter. That’s because that route is handled on the client side and server doesn’t know about it. To fix that you need to add a URL rewrite rule to return your index.html for all legitimate routes.

In case of Netlify, just create a file named _redirects inside your public and add the following line to it.

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/*    /index.html   200

Result

I created a branch and pushed it up. Then created a PR and voila, the action kicked in and failed, since I have a large image on the about page.

I then reduced the size of the image and pushed the changes up. This time it passed.

Summary

We learned together how to use Lighthouse CI, a tool which allows you to run audits on your sites from command line in our CI/CD pipeline to make sure no one is downgrading the performance when they work on the application.

This way, we’re always on top of our game rather than creating backlog items to find the issues and fix them later.

In addition to that, your users are going to be happy and remain happy with their experience which is worth all the effort.

Hope you’ve enjoyed reading this and happy performance enforcement 👋🏽.

How I recovered a day's worth of work with git 🏥

Sun, 05 Apr 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I was working on a project a week ago and had a local branch (with a few commits) I was going to push to upstream to create a PR (pull request). However, after pulling down master and rebasing, I realised all of my code except my first commit is gone after rebase 😱.

Background

I had a local branch which I was working on. Since I’d made a few changes before end of the day, I committed those and went about to do some parenting.

The day after that, I restarted my work and had many other changes in a few other commits by the time I was ready to push my code to upstream. But before we do it, it’s our practice to pull down master and rebase in case there is any conflict, or changes made by someone else has had any side effects on the bit we’ve done.

Rebase

So I pulled down the master branch and rebased it directly from origin using (don’t do this at home please, I’ll explain later):

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git pull origin master --rebase

Once done, I realised I had some conflicts since someone else had worked on one of the files I’d modified. So I started the merge conflict process and made sure all was good. However, I didn’t realised that when I tested the web application, the latest code wasn’t refreshed, and I was seeing my own code (don’t ask me why, it’s an old code base and you need to rebuild and hard refresh every time you make a change).

Having seen all is good I created a PR and went for lunch. One of colleagues then reviewed the PR and since all my changes had gone apart from the small parts from yesterday’s commit, he approved and completed the PR.

Someone raised a bug

I was working on something else when I realised someone has raised a bug on the feature I’d implemented and when I checked the code I was in total shock since most of my code wasn’t there anymore. So I checked my local branch and saw that’s the case, in fact several of my commits were missing from that branch altogether.

Later I realised that I’d forgotten to add everything before committing 🤦🏽‍♂️. Just to clarify this was during a really crazy time where we were working day and night for over a week to deliver this project for all of our hospitals across Australia and New Zealand to monitor their resources in intensive care like number of available beds, ventilator, etc. I will tell you all about it once I find some time.

Initial try

I started by running:

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git reflog

I saw anything but my commits which expected because that commit command never had happened due to the files that weren’t added.

Checking stash

Next thing I checked was my stashed files:

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git stash list

This showed me there were two sets of stashed files.

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stash@{0}: WIP on elmah: 82eb0a4 Merged PR 426: Fixed pass change page
stash@{1}: WIP on availability: 87b2264 Dashboard is now grouping based on hospital category, has got a filter and a search box to search for hospitals

Then I looked into each of these with git stash show stash@{0} and git stash show stash@{1} but I didn’t see any of those.

checking git database

At this point I realised that I needed some help and I contacted Scott one of our git gurus to help me fine out what happened. He suggested we start by checking the database for any lost commit using:

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git fsck --lost-found

From the documentation:

—lost-found: Write dangling objects into .git/lost-found/commit/ or .git/lost-found/other/, depending on type. If the object is a blob, the contents are written into the file, rather than its object name.

This showed me a bunch of stuff including some dangling commits.

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Checking object directories: 100% (256/256), done.
Checking objects: 100% (4282/4282), done.
dangling tree 484106954fff79e5a4d7b8fd53fca05311e56e79
dangling blob d10124a92b82ccdcb1521ef814f815b75223e0f3
dangling commit 4c8288a8c30d4171c4935982e18ebd842a2c2811
dangling tree ae02e6d9b291775c9bc1eb1489ba341f8b033f48
dangling commit 2ec37c71f59766d55c09830a5b6e2c5e1c741a95
dangling blob 40c3c7ccbd197c78ceddf71c2be01b0db2114ba9
dangling tag a70363ef35f023e57e00fc625bee362c2e9e4bc9
dangling commit 1184e4a583e3d0f9cf9f3cb994a3375b16d122cd

So we started to go through some of these to find out which one contained the files I was after.

We checked out a few of those commits and couldn’t find what we were after. Then he suggested we check those dangling blobs which technically are a tree object containing a snapshot of everything in your current branch.

Checking git dangling blobs

You cannot checkout those objects, instead you need to use below command where the last part is the hash code of the blob you’re looking into:

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 git ls-tree -r d134e9e

You can copy this from the output of the previous command and you don’t need the whole hash value, just a few from the beginning.

The output of this command looks like this:

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100644 blob ea25f3a9fe6094d700588f33c340d32281a7614b    src/ARV.Database/ARV.Database.sqlproj.orig
100644 blob 2e47fe1d11bd2624065866591af00f80f16e5e1e    src/ARV.Web.Reach/Partials/hird/incident.form.campuses.list.html
100644 blob 2a6b2547ace20f6bbda788dc4e97e4a749281185    src/ARV.Web.Reach/Scripts/app/core/filters.js
100644 blob a366e78d88695f3c1a2b5617ec03fd24387f2323    src/ARV.Web.Reach/Scripts/app/hird/incident.form.controller.js
100644 blob 461c0e11c1ad64a0bee7bb7f57ba9a99314b1510    src/Arv.Cases.External/App_Data/Arv.Cases.External.XML
100644 blob 276ace5a9dae6be5613beebedcfbf5a64f8e4c4b    src/Arv.Services/Dtos/ReferenceDataDto.cs.orig
100644 blob 5336a10e14295222f28ef087643ac6696dc3cb73    src/Arv.Services/Reach/IIncidents.cs
100644 blob 6e186554f4de5347a754d39ebca1dd8867b7eb0a    src/Arv.Services/Reach/Incidents.cs
100644 blob cf70ac7b4af8f9d8e89c2d84e45a23bdaf7c99de    src/Arv.Services/ReferenceData.cs.orig
100644 blob 502e1286886624c6e0d46b9f65886fbc38b86bca    src/Arv.Web.Core/Controllers/Reach/IncidentController.cs
100644 blob 5ef3891af8afa82dd7cdfc45058a6186e4656c34    src/Arv.Web.Core/Controllers/ReferenceController.cs
100644 blob 49e5d63ba2e59c6389c21c24b81809326711fd27    src/Arv.Web.Core/Controllers/ReferenceController.cs.orig

After checking a few of these blobs, I finally found the one which contained a version of the file close to the finishing state (yes I had to redo some of my work, but now I had to spend half an hour instead of a day).

Checking the file

Once we found the blob, we had to check what’s the content of those files. You can do that using:

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git cat-file -p cf70ac7b

Now you can see the content printed out to the console. But if the file is bit enough like my situation, you could just pipe this command to write it to a file like so:

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git cat-file -p cf70ac7b | out-file temp.js

If you’re using linux or Mac, just use your version of the equivalent.

And that’s it, repeat this until you have all of the files you need.

Summary

A few lessons I learnt from this accident:

Always check you have added all your files before committing (I know it sounds obvious, but it could happen to you the way it happened to me).
Always make sure you commit your changes often after each set of critical change.
This one has become my preference now. Rebase from your local branch and not upstream:

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git add .

git commit -m "Your awesome and informative commit message"

git checkout master

git pull

git checkout feature-branch

git rebase master

And if you lost your code, don’t give up, git is a really powerful tool.

Hope this helps someone to save some time in case of a similar accident.

Stop using `console.log`, start using your DevTools 🛠️

Thu, 19 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

There are many situations where we want to see what’s wrong with out code without the trouble of changing source code and push the changes again, regardless of whether we’re using local environment or production. Most folks start by writing console.log statements throughout their code base and go step by step to find the place where the bug is happening. That’s OK for beginners and where you have access to source code, but what if you don’t want to waste so much time or you don’t even have access to source code?

DevTools

All major browsers have developer tools (aka DevTools) nowadays. It’s important for us web developers to know them well not just because we use them as our daily drivers to test our applications and see how they look like once deployed, but also for times when something is wrong as we want to find them efficiently.

That’s when the DevTools comes very handy if you know the ropes. DevTools have a lot of functionalities; refer to my articles Chrome DevTools can do that? and FireFox DevTools can do that? to have a glimpse of some of these. However, in this article we only focus on debugging experience.

The bug

In order to be able to have a common ground, we need a bug to fix. I’ve created this demo which will be working on in Glitch. In this demo, you would select a date and press the calculate age button. It will calculate your age and show it in the bottom section.

However, there is a bug where sometimes it calculates the age by one year higher than actual. We will be looking into how to fix this.

DevTools’s debugger

Both Chrome and Firefox have a debugger section we will be using in this article. I won’t go through Edge because it’s the same as Chrome.

Chrome

You can open your DevTools in Chrome using Ctrl+Shift+J on Windows or Ctrl+Option+J.

Once opened, navigate to the Sources tab. You will see a file navigator pane on the left where you can inspect the files that the page uses. Then there is the editor pane in the middle where you can click on the file from the navigator pane and see the content and edit them locally in the browser. And last you will see the JavaScript debugging pane where you have a set of features which you’ll learn about shortly.

💡 If you resize the DevTools you might see these panes in different positions.

Firefox

In Firefox you need to use Ctrl+Shift+I on Windows or Ctrl+Option+I to open up the web developer tools.

When opened, click on debugger tab which is very similar to what you saw before. On the left, you’ll see the navigation pane, next to it is editor pane and to the left (or below depending on how wide you’ve got your DevTools open) is the debug pane.

Setting a breakpoint

When it comes to debugging, a common method is to use console.log statements throughout the code base which sometimes is abused.

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const yo = document.querySelector('#yo');

function getAge() {
    console.log('Getting the date of birth value');
    const dateString = document.querySelector('#age').value;
    console.log(`date of birth is ${dateString}`);
    var today = new Date();
    var birthDate = new Date(dateString);
    var age = today.getFullYear() - birthDate.getFullYear();
    console.log(`age is ${age}`);
    var m = today.getMonth() - birthDate.getMonth();
    console.log(`Birth month is ${m}`);
    if (m < 0 || (m = 0 && today.getDate() < birthDate.getDate())) {
      console.log('The birth month is negative or is zero, we need to reduce the age by one year');
      age--;
      console.log(`Real age is ${age}`);
    }
   yo.textContent = age;
}

And then you look at the console to see where the bug might be. But this process is painstakingly slow which impacts your productivity a lot. So let’s see how breakpoints help us get to the point real quick.

Breakpoints have the advantage of being in real time compared to console.log statements where you need to wait for the code to get deployed and inspect the console. Apart from that, with console.log statements, you need to explicitly mention which values you want to expect whereas in a breakpoint debugger shows you all of them.

Now let’s take one step back and see how we can go about finding where to set our breakpoint to. In some cases like this you will think OK, the age is correct sometimes and not others depending on the month. So you can find your file and set your breakpoint right where the if condition is.

In some other cases where the code base might be larger, or you might be new to the team, it makes sense to follow the flow of the page. In our case user selects a date and then clicks on the calculate age button.

The logic behind happens under that click, you the best thing for us is to set a breakpoint on the click event listener. Event Listener Breakpoints are designed for this.

Chrome

In Chrome, in the debug page, click on the Event Listener Breakpoints and expand the section. Then find the Mouse category and select the click event.

Now click on the calculate age button and DevTools will pause when the event listener executes. You might need to click on the Resume Script Execution if you’re using a platform like Glitch, but for your own app that won’t be needed. When the breakpoint reaches the button in your HTML, press Step into function and you’ll end up in our getAge function. Once you’ve stepped into the function you wanted, you can go one line at a time by clicking on the step over button or pressing F10.

Firefox

You can use the same approach to enable a mouse click event listener breakpoint in Firefox, simply expand the Event Listener Breakpoints section in the debugger pane, then expand Mouse and select the click event.

Once enables, you could follow the same procedure we described before. First click on the calculate age button and the debugger automatically pauses on the first function call. In case of using a platform like Glitch or CodePen, that might not be what you’re after, so simply press the Resume button until you see the breakpoint stop at the getAge function. Then click on the Step In button or press F11 to go inside the function. Once you’re inside the function simply press Step over button or F11 to go line by line from thereon.

Line breakpoint

Line breakpoints are mainly used when you’ve narrowed down where the bug might actually be. In our case when we stepped through the getAge function, we saw that the age is calculated based on the year, then there is an if condition which will be responsible to reduce the age by one if the month is less than the current month minus the month of birth.

So we roughly know that if the age is calculated right in some cases and wrong by one year in others, the if condition is where we should set our line breakpoint on.

There are two ways to do this in DevTools, one is to follow the event listener breakpoint flow explained above. But if you know the filename beforehand, you can simply open the file in the editor pane and scroll through until you reach the line you want.

Once you’re there, simply click the line number and it will put a Line Breakpoint icon on that line so that you’d know where the breakpoint is set. You can remove the breakpoint by simply clicking on it again.

Now if you click the calculate age button, the program stops on the if condition. This part is exactly the same in both Chrome and Firefox.

Checking variable values

When you’re stopped at the if condition, if you want to see what is the value of a variable, simply have a look at the debugger pane’s Scope section in Chrome or Scopes section in Firefox.

Chrome

Firefox

Spotting the bug

Now let’s see where the bug is and how to fix it. If you have a look at the if condition more closely, you’ll see that there are two main parts in there. First one is m < 0 to check whether the month is less than zero, and the second is m = 0 && today.getDate() < birthDate.getDate() to check if the month is zero and today is less than birthday.

Now we know that someone’s used an equal sign instead of equality operator which has caused this bug. So let’s replace the = with === and then press Ctrl+S to save the changes. You can leave the breakpoint or remove it test with some dates to see if the bug is fixed or not. But after some tests we know that the bug is fixed. It’s time for you to go and write a test for this function so you won’t face the same bug again 😁.

Console window

Don’t forget that you can evaluate your expressions in the console window of the browser. As in you could simply put your condition in the console and see whether it’s returning true or false.

What else?

There are heaps of other breakpoints you could use such as conditional breakpoints which are triggered only if a condition you provide is true, breakpoints on caught and uncaught exceptions, and XHR breakpoints which are triggered when a URL matches a substring you’ve set. Let’s try a XHR breakpoint in , open up your DevTools, head over to debug pane and open the XHR Breakpoints section. Click in the box to add a line and enter raw and press Enter. Now refresh the page and you’ll see the breakpoint hit when the request is made. You can now use the same technique we saw earlier to step in the code and set a like breakpoint to debug further.

Small catch

One catch is that you need to make sure that the function you’re debugging is in the scope which is tricky if you’re using DevTools. In order to get it working you need to set a line breakpoint somewhere where the function is in scope, then trigger the breakpoint and call debug() in the DevTools console while the code is still paused on the line breakpoint.

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(function () {
  function hello() {
    console.log('hello');
  }
  function world() {
    console.log(' world');
  }
  hello(yo); // This works.
  world();
})();
debug(hello); // This doesn't work. hey() is out of scope.

Summary

We saw how powerful the DevTools are and how much they can help us to find and fix bugs in our code. So stop using console.log and get to know your DevTools better. Happy coding from home ❤️.

What you need to know about Full screen API 💻

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 00:00:00 GMT

There are many situations where we’d like to see our web page in fullscreen mode. Be it games, online courses, video tutorials, or simply wanting more reading space while reading a book. What we usually do in these sort of scenarios is we manually set our browser’s tab/window in fullscreen mode (F11), but the result is not always what we expect, because some content is not designed to be viewed in fullscreen mode. Besides, what if we help our users to go fullscreen automatically instead, again it all comes to having a better user experience.

Intro

Full Screen API adds methods to the HTML Element to enable us to programmatically turn any content on a page to enter in fullscreen mode via JavaScript. WebGL, canvas, and video elements are the usual targets when it comes to going fullscreen. Online newspapers and magazines are other areas where this can be helpful.

So let’s see this in action first and then go through some details:

See the Pen Full Screen API Demo by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

All we’re doing here is to call a method which is added by the Full Screen API:

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const vid = document.getElementById('shuttle');

function toggleFullScreen() {
  if (!document.fullscreenElement && vid.requestFullscreen) {
    vid.requestFullscreen();
  } else {
    if (document.exitFullscreen) {
      document.exitFullscreen(); 
    }
  }
}

document.addEventListener("keydown", function(e) {
  if (e.keyCode == 13) {
    toggleFullScreen();
  }
}, false);

Exposed properties

There are two properties exposed on the document object:

💡 DocumentOrShadowRoot.fullscreenElement

The fullscreenElement property will give you the element that is displayed in fullscreen mode at the moment. It’s a way to check whether we’re in full screen mode or not.

💡 Document.fullscreenEnabled

The fullscreenEnabled property tells you whether or not the document is currently in a state that would allow fullscreen mode to be requested.

Exiting fullscreen

You’ll want to be sure to let your users know that they can press the Esc key (or F11) to exit fullscreen mode.

In addition, navigating to another page, changing tabs, or switching to another application (using, for example, Alt-Tab) while in fullscreen mode exits fullscreen mode as well.

As you saw in the example above, exiting the fullscreen mode can be done using document.exitFullscreen:

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if (document.exitFullscreen) {
  document.exitFullscreen(); 
}

Feature detection

You can simply detect whether the feature is supported or not using either document.requestFullscreen or Element.requestFullscreen:

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if(element.requestFullscreen) {
  element.requestFullscreen();
}

or:

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if(document.requestFullscreen) {
  // enter fullscreen mode
}

Finding whether or not you’re in fullscreen mode

As mentioned earlier, the document.fullscreenElement is a good way to check whether the browser is in full screen mode or not. The value of this property will be null if we’re not in fullscreen, and the current fullscreen element otherwise.

⚠️ There is also a boolean property called fullscreen which is deprecated and should not be used. Although most of the browsers still support it.

Presentation

When toggling fullscreen mode programmatically, you’re responsible for how the elements will look like and what appears on the screen. It’s obvious you will need to change the width and height of the element to %100, and fortunately, there is a CSS pseudo-selector for you to use:

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#shuttle:fullscreen {
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
}

Also you might want to hide some other elements on the screen to reduce clutter:

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:fullscreen .hide {
  display: none;
}

Browser support

The browser support is really good at this point, almost all major browsers fully support it. Only IE11 and Safari have partial support. Opera mini and Android Browser do not support it at this point.

Hope you’ve learned a new trick if you didn’t know about this API and happy fullscreening (just made up the word 😁).

Stop gobbling up that memory 🛑

Fri, 28 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve been writing web applications for more than a decade. From classic ASP to PHP, ASP.Net web forms and the list goes on and on. However, something that’s been common between all those years for me has been to care about how performing the site is. One important part of that has been to look out for memory leaks, because they can cause the page to go super slow or even crashing in more serious scenarios.

Intro

Memory leaks are a common problem in software development, regardless of whether the language you’re using is memory managed or not. By that I mean languages which come with a garbage collector. Memory leaks happen when a piece of memory is allocated, but never freed by the application, and is not returned to the container app or the operating system.

I remember going through the concept in uni, but I can’t remember anything apart from the fact that usually there is a tree made up of all the occupied memory locations. Every time the garbage collector is looking into the memory parses that tree, and if a node is not connected to any branch, it gets recollected and returned to the main program.

Most of us web developers are likely to use one of the major frameworks or libraries to write our applications. Some maybe using a bit older languages like PHP or Ruby, but no matter what we use, there will be a high chance that we come face to face with this problem one way or another.

Consequences

So what happens when there is a memory leak in our applications 🤔?

In some cases the memory consumption just keeps going up. If the user is using a decent spec machine, they might not even realise it. Not everyone is obsessed like us developers checking their task manager often to see how much memory is consumed.

Regardless, it slows down the page, makes interactions not responsive, and might even cause the tab or the whole window to crash.

Memory leak in JavaScript

It’s way easy in JavaScript to allocate some memory and forget about it. Even if you’re not writing plain JavaScript, it’s still possible that a memory leak happen, without you noticing it.

But how does it happen?

In JavaScript there are a few possible ways a memory leak can happen.

Unintentionally creating global variables
Timers and callbacks
Out of DOM references
Closures
Event listeners

Global variables

It’s very simple to create an unwanted global variable in JavaScript. Consider below code:

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function helloWorld() {
  name = 'Yas';
  console.log(`Hello ${name}`);
}

In this simple function we have created a global variable called name. We didn’t want to, but we did it anyway.

💡 A reference to an undeclared variable creates a new variable inside the global object.

Same thing can happen if you use this:

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function helloWorld(args) {
  this.name = 'Yas';
  console.log(`Hello ${name}`);
}

To prevent these sorts of leaks, use JavaScript in strict mode. You can do it by adding use strinct; at the top of your JavaScript file.

Even thought we consider accidental global variables one of the memory leak sources, there are still many global variables defined by the framework we use, or even the ones we intend to be there. Remember these are non collectable variables and unless nulled or reassigned, garbage collectors can’t do anything about them.

Timers and callbacks

The use of setInternal and setTimeout has gotten less and less popular as we’ve moved towards more modern concepts like async/await. Furthermore, some libraries and frameworks provide observables to facilitate callbacks. In which case they’re responsible for making sure the callbacks are unreachable once their own instance gets destroyed.

However, there are quite a number of scenarios where we need to use it in order to call a function at a later time or on a schedule.

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let data = fetchData();
setInternal(function() {
  let node = document.querySelector('#list');
  // loop through data and create the html
  node.innerHTML = transform(data);
}, 1000)

This example shows how a timer can turn into something that cannot be collected. Even if the list node is removed from the DOM, the reference inside the handler remains active and cannot be collected. That causes their dependencies to be non collectable as well. So the data variable which might be really large, would sit in memory long after its need has ended.

Now let’s see how we can improve this to avoid a memory leak:

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let node = document.querySelector('#list');
let data = fetchData();

function handler(data) {
  if(node) {
    // do stuff with data and create the list
    node.innerHTML = transform(data);
  }
};

setInterval(handler, 1000);

Out of DOM references (detached DOM)

When some nodes are removed from the DOM but still exists in memory through JavaScript, we have out of DOM references or detached DOM. Usually it means there is a reference to a variable which was referencing that node.

DOM is a doubly linked tree, meaning any reference to any node would mean the entire tree would not be garbage collected.

Let’s go through an example to make this a bit more clear:

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function create() {
  let ul = document.createElement('ul');
  ul.id = 'list';
  for (var i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
    var li = document.createElement('li');
    li.textContent = `Item # ${i}`;
    ul.appendChild(li);
  }
  return ul;
}

const list = create();

document.body.appendChild(list);

function deleteList() {
  document.body.removeChild(document.getElementById('list'));
}

document.getElementById('delete').addEventListener('click', deleteList);

Clicking the delete button, will remove the list from the DOM, but there is a reference in JavaScript, so the list never gets garbage collected. We could identify detached node using heap snapshots in your browser DevTools. I am using Chrome here, but you can use Edge (similar to Chrome), and Firefox too.

And once the snapshot is taken, type detached in the filter text box and you’ll see the detached DOM nodes.

The way to fix these kind of issues is to always use local variables so that the reference is destroyed once the function execution is done.

Closures

Closures are one of the JavaScript’s features where most beginners struggle with. But once you’ve got it, it’s really easy to follow. In it’s core, a closure gives you access to an outer function’s scope from an inner function.

A more technical definition is that a closure is a combination of a function bundled together with references to it’s surrounding state (the lexical environment).

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function init() {
  var hello = 'Hello'; // hello is a local variable created by init
  function helloWorld() { // helloWorld() is the inner function, a closure
    console.log(`${hello} world!`); // use variable declared in the parent function
  }
  helloWorld();
}
init();

Now that we know what’s a closure, let’s see how they can cause memory leaks. Imagine the following code:

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var newElem;
 
function outer() {
    var someText = new Array(1000000);
    var elem = newElem;

    function inner() {
        if (elem) return someText;
    }

    return function () {};
}

setInterval(function () {
    newElem = outer();
}, 5);

In the above code, the inner function is never called, but it holds a reference to the elem. Keep in mind the scope of the inner is the same as function () {} which is returned by the outer function. Since newElem is a global variable, as long as a reference is pointing to function () {}, the shared context is preserved and someText is kept. Each call will then result in a remaining reference and as time goes by, we run out of memory eventually.

So what we can we do about these type of scenarios? First we need to stop using var. And furthermore, if we call the inner function like outer()(), then there won’t be any references left.

Event listeners

Every time you attach an event handler to a specific element, you need to keep a reference and remove it when you’re finished. So instead of:

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function deleteList() {}

document.getElementById('delete').addEventListener('click', deleteList);

We should be doing:

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function deleteList() {}

document.getElementById('delete').addEventListener('click', deleteList);

// do stuff

document.getElementById('delete').removeEventListener('click', deleteList);

Summary

We saw what will cause a potential memory leak in JavaScript and how to fix those issues, however, keep in mind that in most cases if you’re using a framework or library, these things are handled for you. If you’re using a library which you might suspect is causing memory leaks, you could easily find out using your browser DevTools memory profiler.

Hope this article has raised some awareness so that you can write more performing code and make user experience much better. No one wants to have their browser chew up memory like cheesecake right 😁?

Resources

More about Chrome DevTools memory profiler.
Find out about Firefox DevTools memory profiling.

Run code analysis with sonarqube using docker

Sun, 23 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I help some of my friends perform code reviews on their code bases from time to time as a side activity. I’ve used codelyzer before and it’s very similar to tslint in a sense. However, I wanted to test something new and thought let’s give SonarQube a shot this time.

Intro

SonarQube® is an automatic code review tool to detect bugs, vulnerabilities and code smells in your code. It can integrate with your existing workflow to enable continuous code inspection across your project branches and pull requests.

It has a server component where you can create projects and apply configurations like adding plugins and updating existing ones. And then there is a scanner component where it scans your code base and sends the result to the server to show in the SonarQube dashboard.

There are multiple versions of SonarQube but we’re going to use the community edition which is free and open source.

So without further ado, let’s get to it.

Setup

The documentation is really great, and there is a great two minute get started which is what I used to get my hand wet real quick. However, soon I realised that I have to install a lot of dependencies to get it working.

I was thinking how to avoid the extra installations, when suddenly a smile came to my face when I saw there is a docker image as well.

On the Docker Hub, you can find the information you need to get started, but for the purpose of this article, I just use a single command to get it going.

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docker run -d --name sonarqube -p 9000:9000 sonarqube

This command will pull the image down and create a container from it. Run the container in the background mode and then exposes the port 9000 through to host.

Once done, you need to wait for a few mistunes for the server to get started. You can open a browser of your choice and go to localhost:9000 to see the server dashboard.

Use the default username as admin and the password admin to login.

Create a project

I don’t want to go deep into SonarQube here, but a project represents a code base where you can see the result of a scan done by the scanner. So once logged in, click on create a new project button in the centre of the page, then enter a unique project key and a display name.

On the next page enter a name for your project token. This is the key which scanner will use to authenticate to the server and send the result of a scan up.

Take note of this key as you can never see it once you’re navigated away from this page. Click continue and you’ll see a screen where you can specify your project configuration.

I wanted to run this on an Angular project with TypeScript, so I chose other, and then windows from the OS prompt.

Downloading the scanner

At this point you need to download the scanner and unzip it in a folder named sonarqube on your drive. I usually use c:\tools for these sort of usage (replace this with what you used if you chose to unzip it elsewhere).

Once done, open your scanner config file named sonar-scanner.properties from c:\tools\sonarqube\config folder and uncomment the line which specifies the server address.

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#Configure here general information about the environment, such as SonarQube server connection details for example
#No information about specific project should appear here

#----- Default SonarQube server
sonar.host.url=http://localhost:9000

#----- Default source code encoding
sonar.sourceEncoding=UTF-8

Running a scan

Once done, you’re ready to go. Run the command below from your project root and wait for the scan to finish.

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C:\tools\sonar\bin\sonar-scanner.bat -D"sonar.projectKey=fp" -D"sonar.sources=." -D"sonar.host.url=http://localhost:9000" -D"sonar.login=**********************************" -D"sonar.exclusions=node_modules/**/*"

Don’t forget to replace the key you got from the previous step in the sonar.login argument.

💡 In the last step when you downloaded the scanner zip file, the command you need to execute is written down for you ready to go, just add the exclude folder to avoid code analysis on external libraries.

It takes a while for the scan to finish based on the size of your code base. But once done, you can see the result in the SonarQube dashboard.

ℹ️ Remember to run npm install or yarn if you’ve just forked the code base from your git repository. I faced a few errors before I realised I didn’t have those installed and they are used by the scanner.

And once done, here is yow your dashboard will look like. Obviously the code base I was reviewing was a bit chaotic.

And you when you click on issues you can see them by category and also the rules used to perform the scan.

Summary

In terms of the speed, I was very happy with the result. It took nearly 2 minutes to scan my entire code base with more than 520 files and thousands line of code.

In term of the scan result, I would say based on the default rule set and considering that this was the community edition, the results are slightly better than tslint or codelyzer. I could easily navigate through issues, find out what line of code needed attention. It showed me the results with syntax highlighting and a lo of categories and tags where I could drill down and find what I wanted quickly.

So go ahead and give it a shot, I am sure you’ll find enough to keep you busy for a while to fix those. And bare in mind that it not only gives you linting errors, it will also give you some security hints based on OWASP top 10 as well.

Retro HTML, let's create marquees 😃

Sun, 09 Feb 2020 00:00:00 GMT

One of the first things I learnt to do with HTML was using marquee to move text across the screen horizontally. It was so cool to be able to create advertisements on a page and make users notice things with just a tag. Of course people overused it and then it became a out of fashion item in the new designs just like baggy jeans from 90s.

History

The HTML <marquee> element was used to insert a scrolling area of text. You could control what happened when the text reached the edge of it’s area using its attribute. Of course when I use past tense it doesn’t mean it’s not supported anymore. It became obsolete a while back, but most browsers still support it.

You can see it in action:

See the Pen Marquee by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

CSS marquees

So I want to simulate some of these with just CSS. We’ll be using CSS animations and play with overflow to simulate text reaching to the edge.

Scrolling text

So let’s play with translateX() to specify the content placement at the start and end of the animation. We’ll use this to keep the text moving between start and end.

For the animation we will use an infinite linear with 10 seconds duration.

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.marquee {
  height: 50px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}
.marquee span {
  font-size: 2em;
  color: turquoise;
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 50px;
  text-align: center;
  transform:translateX(100%);
  animation: cssmarquee 10s linear infinite;
}
@keyframes cssmarquee {
  0% {
  transform: translateX(100%);
  }
  100% {
  transform: translateX(-100%);
  }
}

And the HTML is simple:

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<div class="marquee">
  <span>Scrolling Text </span>
</div>

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-ScrollText by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Slide in

Now let’s slide in the text and fix it at the beginning. We’ll use ease-out with a 200% value for translateX start and 0% for the end.

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.marquee {
  height: 50px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}
.marquee span {
  font-size: 2em;
  color: green;
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 50px;
  text-align: left;
  animation: cssmarquee 10s ease-out;
}
@keyframes cssmarquee {
  0% {
    transform: translateX(200%);
  }
  100% {
    transform: translateX(0%);
  }
}

I won’t repeat the HTML code again to save some typing 😁. It’s exactly as above.

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-SlineIn by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Left to right

Now let’s move the text from left to right this time. Again, we’ll use a linear infinite animation with the reverse values for translateX as our first example.

The only other difference will be the initial value for transform property.

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.marquee {
  height: 50px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}
.marquee span {
  font-size: 2em;
  position: absolute;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  color: green;
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 50px;
  text-align: center;
  /* Starting position */
  transform: translateX(-100%);
  animation: cssmarquee 20s linear infinite;
}
@keyframes cssmarquee {
  0% {
    transform: translateX(-100%);
  }
  100% {
    transform: translateX(100%);
  }
}

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-L2R by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Scroll vertically

By now you should be comfortable guessing what will be using. Instead of translateX, we will be using translateY.

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.marquee {
  height: 100px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}
.marquee span {
  font-size: 2em;
  position: absolute;
  color: green;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 50px;
  text-align: center;
  transform: translateY(-100%);
  animation: cssmarquee 5s linear infinite;
}
@keyframes cssmarquee {
  0% {
    transform: translateY(-100%);
  }
  100% {
    transform: translateY(100%);
  }
}

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-Down by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Bouncing text

Now let’s assume back then people wanted to get fancy. We want to bounce the text this time 😃. We will need to add alternate to our animation and reduce the delay. We will also add trnslateX so that the content doesn’t bounce off the whole page.

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.marquee {
  height: 200px;
  overflow: hidden;
  position: relative;
}
.marquee span {
  font-size: 2em;
  position: absolute;
  color: turquoise;
  width: 100%;
  height: 100%;
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 50px;
  text-align: center;
  transform: translateY(70%);
  animation: cssmarquee 1s linear infinite alternate;
}
@keyframes cssmarquee {
  0% {
    transform: translateY(70%);
  }
  100% {
    transform: translateY(0%);
  }
}

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-Bounce by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Typewriting effect

Now this time we want to mix our animation with a bit of stepping to create a typewriter effect. We will be using from and to for our keyframes. Then use steps and step-end to simulate the text and blink cursor effect.

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body {
  font-family: 'Special Elite', cursive;
  background: #efefef;
  padding-top: 5em;
  display: flex;
  justify-content: center;
}

.typewriter h1 {
  overflow: hidden; 
  border-right: .15em solid green; 
  white-space: nowrap;
  margin: 0 auto; 
  letter-spacing: .15em; 
  animation: 
    type 4s steps(50, end),
    blink-cursor .7s step-end infinite;
}

@keyframes type {
  from { width: 0 }
  to { width: 100% }
}

@keyframes blink-cursor {
  from, to { border-color: transparent }
  50% { border-color: green; }
}

Don’t forget to add the Special Elite font from Google fonts.

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<head>
  <link href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Special+Elite&display=swap" rel="stylesheet">
</head>

See the Pen CSS-Marquee-TypeWriter by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Summary

That was it. You can go back to whatever important job you were doing. A bit of distraction is always good for me and hope this bit was good for you too 😊. Until next time 👋🏼.

If you consider Puppeteer cool, then Playwright is awesomeness 😍

Fri, 24 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

If you’ve ever used Puppeteer, you’d know it enables you to control a Chrome instance (or any other Chrome DevTools Protocol based browser) and execute common actions, much like in a real browser - programmatically, through a decent API. The same team has now build a new product called Playwright which apparently is their new favourite.

What is Playwright? 🤔

Playwright is a Node library which allows you to automate all major browsers - Chrome, Firefox, WebKit, and the new Microsoft Edge - plus the ability to execute actions, take screenshots, and much more, similar to Puppeteer.

In their own words:

Playwright is focused on enabling cross-browser web automation platform that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast. Our primary goal with Playwright is to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness, improving the speed of execution and offering insights into the browser operation.

Imagine the possibility of running end to end tests on all major browsers before you ship your any product to your users.

Is is replacing Puppeteer?

Based on what I see and how they’ve answered, I’d say YES. But with a promise to contain all of the functionality of Puppeteer, and make it a cross platform, vendor-neutral, and a collaboration effort between all major parties.

The lessons learnt are incorporated into it, APIs are testing-friendly, and it will be a cloud native product. For example all the user agent/device emulation is setup consistently on an object called BrowserContext to enable multi-page scenarios, click waits for the element to be available and visible by default, there is a way to wait for network and other events, etc.

Getting started

You can install Playwright via npm:

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npm i playwright

This will install Playwright and its dependencies. Note that it will also download the browser binaries which are quite bulky (~50MB to ~150MB).

Launching a browser

Playwright module provides a method to launch a browser instance. The following is a typical example of using Playwright to drive automation. Below snippet shows opening a Chrome instance and browsing example.com page.

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const playwright = require('playwright').chromium;  // Or 'firefox' or 'webkit'.

(async () => {
  const browser = await playwright.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  const page = await context.newPage('http://example.com');
  // other actions...
  await browser.close();
})();

Taking a screenshot of the page

You can execute most of the actions available on DevTools. For example we can take a screenshot of the page like so:

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const pw = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await pw.webkit.launch(); // or 'chromium', 'firefox'
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  const page = await context.newPage();

  await page.goto('https://www.example.com/');
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });

  await browser.close();
})();

Emulate a device

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const playwright = require('playwright').firefox;  
const iPhone = playwright.devices['iPhone 11 Pro'];

(async () => {
  const browser = await playwright.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext({
    viewport: iPhone.viewport,
    userAgent: iPhone.userAgent
  });
  const page = await context.newPage('http://example.com');
  // other actions...
  await browser.close();
})();

Going beyond simple

Playwright allows you to easily emulate geo-location data.

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const pw = require('playwright');
const pixel2 = pw.devices['Pixel 2'];

(async () => {
  const browser = await pw.chromium.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext({
    viewport: pixel2.viewport,
    userAgent: pixel2.userAgent,
    geolocation: { longitude: 12.492507, latitude: 41.889938 },
    permissions: { 'https://www.google.com': ['geolocation'] }
  });

  const page = await context.newPage('https://maps.google.com');
  await page.click('text="Your location"');
  await page.waitForRequest(/.*pwa\/net.js.*/);
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'colosseum-android.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

Note how we had to set the grant the necessary permission on the context, which means this is exactly what happens when a user browses the page.

Accessing elements on page

ElementHandle represents an in-page DOM element. ElementHandles can be created with the page.$ method, similar to what we’ve been using in DevTools.

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const playwright = require('playwright').chromium;  // Or 'firefox' or 'webkit'.

(async () => {
  const browser = await playwright.launch();
  const context = await browser.newContext();
  const page = await context.newPage('https://example.com');
  const hrefElement = await page.$('a');
  await hrefElement.click();
  // ...
})();

Typing in text boxes

You can emulate a user typing into text fields, for example performing a search action:

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const elementHandle = await page.$('input');
await elementHandle.type('Hello'); // Types instantly
await elementHandle.type('World', {delay: 100}); // Types slower, like a user
await elementHandle.press('Enter');

What else?

You can even play with mouse (pun intended):

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// Using ‘page.mouse’ to trace a 100x100 square.
await page.mouse.move(0, 0);
await page.mouse.down();
await page.mouse.move(0, 100);
await page.mouse.move(100, 100);
await page.mouse.move(100, 0);
await page.mouse.move(0, 0);
await page.mouse.up();

What next?

The list of the available actions and what is available on the API documentation page. The list is almost overwhelming, in a good way 😁.

What browsers are supported?

Chromium: Playwright uses upstream versions of Chromium.
WebKit: Playwright makes a number of modifications to WebCore and WebKit2 in order to extend WebKit’s remote debugging capabilities and support the full set of Playwright APIs.
Firefox: Playwright makes a number of modifications to Firefox as well. Those are adding support for content script debugging, workers, CSP, emulation, network interception, etc. etc.
MS Edge: Since it’s based on Chromium, it’s supported as well.

What is the update cadence?

The team follow semver, and the team are trying to keep in sync with Chromium update cycle, possibly once a month.

But

Playwright is in a stage where there might be breaking changes coming up as it progresses through full support for those browsers. You can find more information around this on their Is Playwright Ready? page.

So go have fun and enjoy this awesome emerging web technology 👍🏼. I will be exploring this on a couple of my side projects too, so stay tuned for more posts.

Get to know the Clipboard API, be smarter with user interactions 📋

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

We face many situations in which we need to interact with user’s clipboard. Up until recently, browsers were using document.execCommand for clipboard interactions. It sounded great and it was (and still is) widely supported way to copy, cut, and paste into web apps, but the catch was that clipboard access is asynchronous and can just write to DOM.

Background

The fact that clipboard access is asynchronous means the user experience was suffering because a clipboard transfer was happening. This got worst when pasting because in most cases you need to sanitise the content can be safely processed.

It even got worst when permissions got into the equation, or the browser had to copy information from a link in the text and page had to wait for a network request, so the usage wasn’t that widespread.

Clipboard API

It was all sad and gloomy until the new Clipboard API was born. This API is a replacement for document.execCommand based copy and pasting that has a well defined permissions model and doesn’t block the page.

This API is a property of the window.navigator and is constructed from below properties and methods:

read()
readText()
write(data)
writeText(text)
addEventListener(event, handler)
removeEventListener(event, handler)
dispatchEvent(event)

To detect whether the feature is supported in the browser or not you can do:

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if (navigator.clipboard) {
  // yep, happy coding.
} else {
  // oh no 😢. Use execCommand for now
}

In addition to that goodness, it can also read from and write to system clipboard 😍. Access to clipboard is behind Permissions API, which means without user’s permission none of these operations are permitted.

Copy text to clipboard

Text can be copied to the clipboard by calling the writeText method. This function returns a promise that will be resolved or rejected based on how the operation was performed.

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navigator.clipboard.writeText('I am writing to clipboard 📋')
  .then(() => {
    console.log('Woohoo');
  })
  .catch(err => {    
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  });

On of the reasons the catch function might be called is that the permission is not granted by the user or they deny it.

You can use an async function and await:

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async function writeTextToClipboard() {
  try {
    await navigator.clipboard.writeText('I am writing to clipboard 📋');
    console.log('Woohoo');  
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  }
}

Read from clipboard

To read the copied text from clipboard, you can use the readText method and wait for the returned promise:

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navigator.clipboard.readText()
  .then(text => {
    console.log('Pasted content: ', text);
  })
  .catch(err => {
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  });

And with async/await:

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async function getCopiedTextFromClioboard() {
  try {
    const text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
    console.log('Pasted content: ', text);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  }
}

Let’s see this in a demo.

See the Pen Clipboard API Demo by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Notice you had to give permission for it to work.

Handling paste

You can hook up to the (surprise) paste event on the document to be able to receive the text when it’s copied into clipboard and a paste action is triggered by user agent. If you want to modify the received data, you need to prevent the event from bubbling up.

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document.addEventListener('paste', async (e) => {
  e.preventDefault(); // need to do something with the text
  try {
    let text = await navigator.clipboard.readText();
    text = text.toUpperCase();
    console.log('Pasted UPPERCASE text: ', text);
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  }
});

Handling copy

Similar to paste, you can handle copy events too:

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document.addEventListener('paste', async (e) => {
  e.preventDefault(); 
  try {
    for (const item of e.clipboardData.items) {
      await navigator.clipboard.write([
        new ClipboardItem({
          [blob.type]: blob
        })
      ]);
    }
    console.log('Image copied.');
  } catch (err) {
    console.error('Oh no: ', err);
  }
});

Permissions

The navigator.clipboard is only supported for pages served over HTTPS, plus clipboard access is restricted only when allowed to prevent further abuse. Active pages can write to clipboard, but reading requires granted permission.

There two new permissions which was introduced when Clipboard API was developed:

The clipboard-write is granted automatically to any active tab.
The clipboard-read must be requested.

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const queryOpts = { name: 'clipboard-read' };
const permissionStatus = await navigator.permissions.query(queryOpts);
// Will be 'granted', 'denied' or 'prompt':
console.log(permissionStatus.state);

// Listen for changes to the permission state
permissionStatus.onchange = () => {
  console.log(permissionStatus.state);
};

Images

We don’t always use text, so the new write() method was introduced to allow us to write other data formats to the clipboard. This method is asynchronous too and truth is, writeText is calling this method behind the scenes.

Write to clipboard

To write an image to clipboard, you need to convert your image to a Blob. You can do it using a canvas element by calling the toBlob() function. At this point you can only pass one image at a time and multi image is under progress by Chrome team.

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const canvas = document.getElementById("myCanvas");
const ctx = canvas.getContext('2d');

var img = new Image();
img.setAttribute('crossorigin', 'anonymous');
img.onload = function() {
  ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, 150, 150);
  img.style.display = 'none';

  canvas.toBlob(function(blob) {
    navigator.clipboard.write([
      new ClipboardItem({
        [blob.type]: blob
      })
    ]);
  })
};
  
img.src = 'https://image-url';

Read the image from clipboard

To read the image you’ll need to use the read() method, which reads the data and returns a list of ClipboardItem objects. You can use for...of which handles the async part for you as well.

Each returned object can have different type, so best option would be to call getType() on it and act accordingly. In our case the corresponding type would be Blob.

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const items = await navigator.clipboard.read(); 

for (const clipboardItem of items) {
  for (const type of clipboardItem.types) {        
    if (type === "image/png") {
      console.log(type);
      const blob = await clipboardItem.getType(type);        
    }
  }
}

You can see a full demo here:

See the Pen Clipboard API Image Demo by Yaser Adel Mehraban (@yashints) on CodePen.

Browser support

The browser support for this API as of writing this article is not there yet. Chrome and Firefox are fully supporting both the Clipboard API and ClipboardEvent API.

Edge doesn’t support it and it’s been worked on in Safari.

Summary

We saw how easy and convenient it is to work with clipboard with this awesome API, and how much better the user experience will be.

So without further ado, happy coding 💻.

A year in review, what's coming 📆

Mon, 06 Jan 2020 00:00:00 GMT

I am back from a well deserved holiday and thought first thing first, I should review the last year and set some goals for the new one to be able to focus my energy to the right direction and learn from any mistake or missed opportunities.

A review on 2019

Last year was a super hectic year for me personally. I was working a full time consultancy job, advancing in my public speaking journey (more on this later), kicking some goals and missing others. All in all, it was a year with some ‘wow great’ and some ‘oh boy’ moments.

But let me start with the good parts first:

Learnt so many new topics and concepts.
Spoke at 8 major conferences and 7 meetups.
Got promoted to lead consultant.
Published 38 blog post.
Restarted going to gym two to three times a week.
Started on Dev.to and reached 15K followers, 170K post views, 6.5K reactions.
Published two npm packages.
Contributed to Open Source.
Read 60 books 🤯 (technical and non-technical).
Finished 10 side projects.
Met so many amazing people and made new friends.
And finished up with a position as a developer advocate for TelstraDev.

It was so good and I couldn’t believe what a little motivation could do.

However, this came with a cost, I felt nearly burnt down and exhausted from all of these activities, so I reduced them towards the end of the year and gave myself some time to recover. I didn’t touch Twitter (apart from posting some photos of my woodworking), didn’t check LinkedIn, read some books, restarted woodworking, enjoyed doing nothing basically.

I don’t want to go through too much detail, overall it was a great year.

2020, where to?

Starting 2020 for me was a with mixed feelings. I wanted to fix some errors I made last year, but at the same time I had to take some tough decisions. So here are my 2020 goals:

Be a better person.
Read more books.
Publish more targeted blog posts.
Take good care of my body and mind.
Learn more, listen more, talk less.
Continue public speaking, but be more selective, get more invitation, maybe a keynote/locknote, help others get started.
Be a caring and mindful advocate for developers out there.
Continue woodworking, spend more time with family, and spend less of weekends on technical subjects to balance lifestyle.
Be more productive by sleeping more, eating healthy food, and more exercise.
Make new friends, surround myself with good people.
And a nice to have one is to start a video podcast on web and front end.

This list is not a far fetched list, it’s a carefully drafted one based on last year’s review and feedback.

And I am so grateful for the support I’ve received by all of you. Keep your positive energy coming and stay tuned for some quality content coming up.

Image aspect ratio done right 😍

Thu, 19 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

If you have an image on the page which is 600x200 pixels, what is the chance of it shown exactly with that size? I’d say not likely, because most of the time it’s put inside a container which defined the width and the image is set to width: %100. But the size of the image is not that important at this point, what is important is that you will have a DOM reflow once the image is loaded.

Problem

Let’s see this in action. I’ll use Glitch to quickly whip up a demo. We need three divs, two of those contain a piece of text and the one in between contains an image.

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<head>
  <title>Image aspect ratio</title>
  <style>
    .image-container {
      width: 500px;
    }

    img {
      width: 100%;
    }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Image aspect ratio done right</h1>
    
  <div >
    <p>
      This is the first bit of text here!
    </p>        
  </div>
  
  <div class="image-container">
    <img src="https://www.hindustantimes.com/rf/image_size_960x540/HT/p2/2018/09/08/Pictures/_7ae928c8-b34e-11e8-bb15-a1f88311a832.jpg"
          width="960" height="540"/>
  </div>
  
  <div>
    <p>
      This is the second bit of text here!
    </p>  
  </div>
</body>

You can see the full page in this Glitch app.

If we load the site under a slow network now (on high speed network you can’t see much of a difference), you will the page load like this:

First the two paragraphs appear close to each other, then when the network request is finished, the image fills its gap and there is a DOM reflow performed to push the second paragraph down. How sad is that 😥?

Solution #1

The very first thing we can do is to simply set the image height to auto. This is a new feature which has landed in FireFox and Chrome. This will tell the browser to find out the metadata from image attributes, calculate the necessary height and reserve that space. So all we need to do is this:

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<style>
  img {
    width: 100%;
  }
</style>

And we we reload the page on the same network, you can see the page load like this:

How good is that 😍?

Solution #2

There is a new proposal in a draft state which is introducing a new CSS property called, well aspect-ratio. With this you can simply add the property to img tag and use the width and height attributes to tell the browser how much space should be reserved.

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img {
  aspect-ratio: attr(width) / attr(height);
}

This has the benefit of being super simple, readable, and supporting most of the images on the web because many people already have put width and height attributes on their images.

On the other hand, a junior developer who’s starting with HTML and CSS doesn’t have any trouble understanding what’s happening and how little should be done to do something properly.

This has been implemented in Firefox, Chrome and Edge.

Summary

Getting image aspect ratio is very important especially if it impacts your site’s user experience. So knowing how to fix that issue is also important. Hope you’ve enjoyed this article and till next time 👋🏼.

Tensorflow.js available on WebAssembly backend 🔥

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Tensorflow.js is a library which lets you perform machine learning in the browser or in Node. It uses the GPU or CPU to do training and calculation, but recently the team have done a great job and brought WebAssembly backend to its ecosystem so that you can perform predictions faster. So without further ado, let’s deep dive into this greatness.

Scenario

Let’s assume you want to perform object detection in a given image. For this you can use multiple models, but for now let’s focus on MobileNet.

We will use parcel to setup our app.

Setup without WASM backend

Packages

We will need to have a package.json file with below setup:

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{
  "name": "wasm-parcel",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Sample parcel app that uses the WASM backend",
  "scripts": {
    "watch": "parcel index.html --open",
    "build": "parcel build index.html"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "@tensorflow/tfjs": "^1.4.0",
    "@tensorflow/tfjs-backend-wasm": "1.4.0-alpha3"
  },
  "browserslist": [
    "defaults"
  ],
  "devDependencies": {
    "@babel/core": "7.7.5",
    "@babel/plugin-transform-runtime": "^7.7.6",
    "@babel/preset-env": "^7.7.6",
    "parcel-bundler": "^1.12.4",
    "parcel-plugin-static-files-copy": "^2.2.1"
  },
  "keywords": []
}

HTML

Let’s setup our app like we do normally with Tensorflow.js. We need to add a div to show the status, and another div which contains an image tag:

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<div class="tfjs-example-container">
  <section class="title-area">
    <h1>TensorFlow.js running on WebAssembly backend</h1>
  </section>

  <section>
    <p class="section-head">Status</p>
    <div id="status"></div>
  </section>

  <section>
    <p class="section-head">Image used</p>

    <img id="img" src="https://cdn.glitch.com/6e79f1d1-4e57-42bc-a2aa-0aaca87b6f6d%2Fpiano.jpg?v=1576551575229" width="224px" />
  </section>
</div>

And let’s our JavaScript file before body close tag:

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<script src="index.js"></script>

Altogether your HTML should look something like this:

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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <title>Hello!</title>
    <meta charset="utf-8" />
    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" />
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div class="tfjs-example-container">
      <section class="title-area">
        <h1>TensorFlow.js running on WebAssembly backend</h1>
      </section>
  
      <section>
        <p class="section-head">Status</p>
        <div id="status"></div>
      </section>
  
      <section>
        <p class="section-head">Image used</p>
  
        <img id="img" src="https://cdn.glitch.com/6e79f1d1-4e57-42bc-a2aa-0aaca87b6f6d%2Fpiano.jpg?v=1576551575229" width="224px" />
      </section>
  
      <script src="index.js"></script>
    </div>
  </body>
</html>

CSS

Let’s add some basic styling so that it’s not an ugly app when we run it. We’re doing some cool stuff here and it deserves good look 😉:

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/* CSS files add styling rules to your content */

body {
  font-family: helvetica, arial, sans-serif;
  margin: 2em;
}

p {
  max-width: 960px;
  line-height: 1.6em;
}

p.section-head {
  font-variant: small-caps;
  text-transform: uppercase;
  letter-spacing: 0.17em;
  line-height: 1.2em;
  font-weight: 500;
  margin-top: 2em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  border-left: 2px solid #ef6c00;
  padding-left: 24px;
  margin-left: -24px;
  color: #818181;
}

JavaScript

In the code we need to perform two main operations, load the model, and use it for prediction. So lets load the model first:

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import * as tf from "@tensorflow/tfjs";

let model = await tf.loadGraphModel(
  "https://tfhub.dev/google/imagenet/mobilenet_v2_100_224/classification/2",
  { fromTFHub: true }
);

And we get a reference to the image tag, use browser.fromPixel method of Tensorflow.js to load the image and normalise it. And at last, feed it into predict method of our model:

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const imgElement = document.getElementById("img");

let img = tf.browser
    .fromPixels(imgElement)
    .resizeBilinear([224, 224])
    .expandDims(0)
    .toFloat();

const prediction = model.predict(img);

Since we want to compare the timing between the two approach, let’s add some timers into our method and measure how long the operation would take. Altogether your JavaScript file should look like this:

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import * as tf from "@tensorflow/tfjs";

function status(text) {
  document.getElementById("status").textContent = text;
}

async function main() {
  
  let model = await tf.loadGraphModel(
    "https://tfhub.dev/google/imagenet/mobilenet_v2_100_224/classification/2",
    { fromTFHub: true }
  );

  const startTime1 = performance.now();  

  const imgElement = document.getElementById("img");
  status("Model loaded!");

  let img = tf.browser
    .fromPixels(imgElement)
    .resizeBilinear([224, 224])
    .expandDims(0)
    .toFloat();
  
  let startTime2 = performance.now();
  
  const logits = model.predict(img);

  const totalTime1 = performance.now() - startTime1;
  const totalTime2 = performance.now() - startTime2;
  status(`Done in ${Math.floor(totalTime1)} ms ` +
      `(not including preprocessing: ${Math.floor(totalTime2)} ms)`);

  const values = await logits.data();
  console.log(values);  
}

document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", main);

.babelrc

If you don’t setup the babel plugins properly, you will get an error like below:

❌ Uncaught ReferenceError: regeneratorRuntime is not defined at HTMLDocument.main (index.js:8)

That’s because we’re using an async function on the top level. Add the below config to your .babelrc file to get around the error.

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{
  "presets": ["@babel/preset-env"],
  "plugins": ["@babel/plugin-transform-runtime"]
}

Running the app

Now you can run yarn followed by yarn watch and a browser window opens with the app inside. You should see a page like this:

Note the time taken to predict what’s in the picture. Now lets add the WebAssebly backend and run the app to see how it performs.

With WASM backend

In order to add the WebAssembly backend you need to install the @tensorflow/tfjs-backend-wasm package:

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{
  ...,
  "dependencies": {
    "@tensorflow/tfjs": "^1.4.0",
    "@tensorflow/tfjs-backend-wasm": "1.4.0-alpha3"
  },
  ...
}

Next step is to let Parcel know how to load the WASM file. When the WASM backend is initialized, there will be a fetch / readFile for a file named tfjs-backend-wasm.wasm relative to the main JS file. That’s why we need to use this section if we’re using a bundler.

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{
  ...,
  "staticFiles": {
    "staticPath": "./node_modules/@tensorflow/tfjs-backend-wasm/dist",
    "excludeGlob": [
      "**/!(*.wasm)"
    ]
  },
  ...
}

And the last thing we need to do is to tell Tensorflow.js to use this backend:

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import "@tensorflow/tfjs-backend-wasm";

async function main() {  
  await tf.setBackend("wasm");
  //...
}

And that’s all you need in order to enable the WebAssembly backend. Now let’s run the app and see the difference:

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yarn && yarn watch

You should see the app compiled and a browser window open:

And boom 🤯, look at the difference there. Almost down by 2 seconds, and that’s just doing a single operation. Imagine if we were doing more operations and the benefits we gain from this approach.

Summary

You can find the full demo on my GitHub repo.

This feature is defo one of the best thing that’s happened since introducing Tensorflow.js to allow web developers get into ML and AI within the browser in my opinion. So go ahead use this feature and benefit from the massive performance improvements.

However, there is a catch 👇🏼:

What’s the catch

The catch is that not all functions are implemented in the WASM backend. It means you can’t run many of the demo’s on it unless the team implement them. You can follow the progress on their GitHub repo to stay on top of the game.

Untitled RSS Feed

Introducing the Intersection Observer V2 ⛌

Context

The problem

Intersection Observer V2

Additional parameters

How does it determine visibility?

What’s the catch?

Summary

Chrome - where did save sessions go? 🤔

What now?

1. Small hack but works (most times 😁)

2. Save them as bookmarks

3. I am too tired to do all of that

Tab Session Manager

Session Buddy

Summary

Chrome - Arrange your tabs with tab groups 😍

The why

How can I do it?

But I don’t see the option

Summary

Did you know about scroll to text? 📜

Background

Scroll to Text Fragment

Use cases

Search engines

Citation / Reference links

Sharing a specific text or paragraph

Summary

Links and JavaScript 🔗

Background

Enough background, tell me what’s this all about

But how do you make a link?

a tag with href

a tag with href and event handler

a tag without href

a tag with href but no link

using button

any other HTML element

What is a proper URL? I hear you ask

Summary

Microsoft Build 2020 highlights 🔣

WSL2

Linux GUI apps in Windows

Winget, Microsoft’s package manager

Microsoft’s new PowerToys Run launcher

Project Reunion

Fluid framework

Project Bonsai

Static Web Apps

Others

Swapping variables in JavaScript 🔁

Traditionally

Without the temp variable

Bitwise XOR

ES6 destructuring

Summary

All you need to know about string in JavaScript 🧵

Introduction

String length

Finding a text in string

indexOf

lastIndexOf

search

endsWith

startsWith

includes

localeCompare

Extracting sub-strings

slice

substring

substr

split

Replacing string content

Case conversion

Concatenation

Trimming and padding

trim

padStart

`a` tag with `href`

`a` tag with `href` and event handler

`a` tag without `href`

`a` tag with `href` but no link

using `button`

Bitwise `XOR`

`indexOf`

`lastIndexOf`

`search`

`endsWith`

`startsWith`

`includes`

`localeCompare`

`slice`

`substring`

`substr`

`split`

`trim`

`padStart`

`padEnd`

`valueOf`

`toString`

`repeat`

`charAt`

`charCodeAt`

`codePointAt`

`normalize`

`for...in`

Using `for...of`