Webtasks as Single Serving Backends

(so you can listen to the same song over and over)

TL;DR

I built the repeatone.club using a webtask as the single serving backend.

webtask.io gives you the ability to run some arbitray code with any HTTP call. One of the features of this that I love is the ability to pass secret parameters to your code, such as auth tokens. In the end this gives you the ability to call authenticated APIs that you couldn’t from your browser without shipping your API client/secret. Think of them as partially applied functions that can be accessed via a simple GET request.

This perfectly fits the bill for any small single page application that has only a few API calls. This is where one of my favorite bands, The National, comes into play.

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Building a Day One Journal as a Static Site

TL;DR

I built metalsmith-dayone to add Day One data to a metalsmith blog.

Over the past year I’ve found that Day One is a great app to keep me “journaling”. It’s easy to use and has a lot of great features that I use to write. It keeps everything private which is what I want most of the time, but I do use it to flesh out ideas for things I might blog or for memories that I might want to share.

This left me wanting to ability easily publish a subset of entries.

Day One does have an export feature, but I found that the publishability of the exports left a lot to be desired. It can do text or HTML, but both of these end up with just one page, even if you export hundreds of entries.

But there’s also a JSON export option! Which meant all I had to do was spend a few nights writing (and rewriting and rewriting) some code, and I’d soon be able to publish a site about all the cute things my daughter does.

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Fun with ES2015: Pascal

Just some fun code to determine Pascal’s triangle for a certain number using some (borderline unreadable 😄) ES2015 patterns.

// Utils
const last = (arr) => arr[arr.length - 1]
const withoutLast = (arr) => arr.slice(0, -1)
const sumWithNext = (arr) => (val, index) => val + arr[index + 1]

// Sum the values from a row
const createRowValues = (arr) => withoutLast(arr).map(sumWithNext(arr))

// Create row padded by the start values
const createRow = (previous, start) => [
  start,
  ...createRowValues(previous),
  start,
]

// Appends a new row based on the last row
const appendRow = (start) => (rows) => [...rows, createRow(last(rows), start)]

// Takes a starting value and the number of rows and returns a nested array
const pascal = (rows, start = 1) =>
  [...Array(rows)].reduce(appendRow(start), [[start]])

pascal(10)

// [ [ 1 ],
//   [ 1, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 2, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 3, 3, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 4, 6, 4, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 5, 10, 10, 5, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 6, 15, 20, 15, 6, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 7, 21, 35, 35, 21, 7, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 8, 28, 56, 70, 56, 28, 8, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 9, 36, 84, 126, 126, 84, 36, 9, 1 ],
//   [ 1, 10, 45, 120, 210, 252, 210, 120, 45, 10, 1 ] ]

Bulk Edit Strava Activities Plugin

TL;DR

Check out the GitHub repo or demo gif.

At some point earlier this year, I wanted to change all my https://strava.com activities from private to public (gotta get on those segment leaderboards!). This looked like a hassle to do by hand, and I’m always looking for a good excuse to prove the XKCD Theory of Automation. So I started coding.

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Deploying Greenkeeper PR Branches with Surge and Codeship

As I’ve mentioned before, Greenkeeper is pretty great. Another tool I love is Surge, which allows you to quickly and easily publish any static content to the web. These two tools can be combined in a pretty cool way to allow you to see a built version of your site anytime Greenkeeper finds a release that doesn’t match your versioning strategy.

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