William Wenge-Murphy BillyWM

Project-specific lint rules with ESLint

A quick introduction

First there was JSLint, and there was much rejoicing. The odd little language called JavaScript finally had some static code analysis tooling to go with its many quirks and surprising edge cases. But people gradually became annoyed with having to lint their code according to the rules dictated by Douglas Crockford, instead of their own.

So JSLint got forked into JSHint, and there was much rejoicing. You could set it up to only complain about the things you didn't want to allow in your project, and shut up about the rest. JSHint has been the de-facto standard JavaScript linter for a long while, and continues to do so. Yet there will always be things your linter could check for you, but doesn't: your team has agreed on some convention that makes sense for them, but JSHint doesn't have an option

Better local require() paths for Node.js

Problem

When the directory structure of your Node.js application (not library!) has some depth, you end up with a lot of annoying relative paths in your require calls like:

const Article = require('../../../../app/models/article');

Those suck for maintenance and they're ugly.

Possible solutions

Hidden classes in JavaScript and Inline Caching

Knowing how internals work is always a good. Pretty much for everything. Cars, trains, computers, you name it. It gives you an insight on what happens under the hood. You also act/react differently based on this knowledge.

As you might have guessed, it’s also true for web development. Knowledge of CSS transitions allows you to achieve better performance and not to use JavaScript in most cases. Knowledge of V8 internals allows you to write more performant JavaScript code. So let’s talk about V8 a little.

A little about V8

V8 is a JavaScript engine built by Google. Firefox built SpiderMonkey, Opera built Carakan and Microsoft built Chakra. One very important difference between V8 and other JavaScript engines is that V8 doesn’t generate any intermediate code. It compiles JavaScr

Most VPN Services are Terrible

Short version: I strongly do not recommend using any of these providers. You are, of course, free to use whatever you like. My TL;DR advice: Roll your own and use Algo or Streisand. For messaging & voice, use Signal. For increased anonymity, use Tor for desktop (though recognize that doing so may actually put you at greater risk), and Onion Browser for mobile.

This mini-rant came on the heels of an interesting twitter discussion: https://twitter.com/kennwhite/status/591074055018582016

How to Ignore Merge Conflicts for Specific Files in a Git Repository

Create a directory and git init it

$ mkdir merge-test
$ cd merge-test/
$ git init

PEG.js is a simple parser generator for JavaScript that produces fast parsers with excellent error reporting. You can use it to process complex data or computer languages and build transformers, interpreters, compilers and other tools easily.

PEG.js offers tracing support to help analyze parser issues with a grammar. The feature is very helpful, but it's not available yet on the version that's published to npm, it's not well-advertised, and not well-documented. This gist explains how to take advantage of PEG.js tracing support.

When you generate your parser, make sure you supply the trace option set to true. If using gulp, do something like this:

var peg = require('gulp-peg');

var paths = {

	= 1
	= +
	= * +
	= *
	=
	[ *( + )+ ,
	= * + ,
	= * + - ,
	,
	= + ,

	{url:'stun:stun01.sipphone.com'},
	{url:'stun:stun.ekiga.net'},
	{url:'stun:stun.fwdnet.net'},
	{url:'stun:stun.ideasip.com'},
	{url:'stun:stun.iptel.org'},
	{url:'stun:stun.rixtelecom.se'},
	{url:'stun:stun.schlund.de'},
	{url:'stun:stun.l.google.com:19302'},
	{url:'stun:stun1.l.google.com:19302'},
	{url:'stun:stun2.l.google.com:19302'},

	//Dr. Seuss once wrote, "IF." He meant, "If you give a fuck, maybe,
	//JUST MAYBE, you can change this shitty world in some small way for
	//the better." I might've been an writer of children's books someday,
	//but instead, I decided to make this. So in lieu of The Lorax,
	//let's call this The Dragon, and have my word be, "DON'T." As in,
	//"Don't do something stupid like this the way I did, you jackass."
	//But the truth is humans are very stubborn creatures. You probably
	//won't listen to my advice and, chances are, neither will I.

	/**
	* = Recursive descent parser =
	*
	* MIT Style License
	* By Dmitry Soshnikov <dmitry.soshnikov@gmail.com>
	*
	* In this short lecture we'll cover the basic (non-predictive, backtracking)
	* recursive descent parsing algorithm.
	*
	* Recursive descent is an LL parser: scan from left to right, doing