Dominik Wilkowski dominikwilkowski

ANSI escape sequences

ANSI escape sequences can be printed to a shell to as instructions. The below is a list of codes I have used often in my CLI programs and I find myself looking up over and over again.

A great article about it can be found here.

Content

Colors

Node.js on Apple Silicon

Node Version Manager (https://github.com/nvm-sh/nvm) works perfectly across native node installations as well as emulated Rosetta installations. The trick I am using here is to install one LTS version of node under Rosetta and another stable version as native binary.

TODO

find a way how to run the same node version on both platforms

Pure ESM package

The package that linked you here is now pure ESM. It cannot be require()'d from CommonJS.

This means you have the following choices:

Use ESM yourself. (preferred)
Use import foo from 'foo' instead of const foo = require('foo') to import the package. You also need to put "type": "module" in your package.json and more. Follow the below guide.
If the package is used in an async context, you could use await import(…) from CommonJS instead of require(…).
Stay on the existing version of the package until you can move to ESM.

Risk Assessment of GitHub Copilot

0xabad1dea, July 2021

this is a rough draft and may be updated with more examples

GitHub was kind enough to grant me swift access to the Copilot test phase despite me @'ing them several hundred times about ICE. I would like to examine it not in terms of productivity, but security. How risky is it to allow an AI to write some or all of your code?

Ultimately, a human being must take responsibility for every line of code that is committed. AI should not be used for "responsibility washing." However, Copilot is a tool, and workers need their tools to be reliable. A carpenter doesn't have to

ANSI Escape Sequences

Standard escape codes are prefixed with Escape:

Ctrl-Key: ^[
Octal: \033
Unicode: \u001b
Hexadecimal: \x1B
Decimal: 27

Some principles and techniques I use in my teams at the moment. I hope these could be helpful for Technical Leads or Product Owners.

Addressing challenges with estimating

Software engineers enjoy solving problems with code. They value understanding why the thing they are working on is important.

For almost all non-trivial tasks, the full scope of dependencies, technical limitations and edge cases only reveal themselves during the development process. For this reason, I try to make the initial planning light touch and focus on the problem to solve. Accepting that we will start the development process before knowing everything can make estimating difficult. Forcing engineers to commit to specific estimates makes them feel that they cannot modify their approach if they learn something through the process of doing. Here are some reasons engineers can struggle with estimating and what can be done to help.

Estimating work that has too many unknowns

Generate a leaner SVG from QR-Code-generator

This is a quick function that can convert a QR code generated with the rust version of QR-Code-generator into a much smaller SVG than the to_svg_string function included in their example. The function is made generic so that you may use this function with other qr sources. All the function needs is a method to check coordinates if they contain a block box or not besides the size and border values.

So if you have the data for your QR code, all you need is to write a method as I did in the FakeQr struct for the tests.

The SVG optimizations:

Remove unneeded attributes, tags and whitespace
Use short form for hex colors

	<?php
	// half-hearted CSS minification
	$css = preg_replace(
	array('/\s(\w)\s{\s/','/\s(\S:)(\s)([^;])(\s\|\n);(\n\|\s)/','/\n/','/\s}\s*/'),
	array('$1{ ','$1$3;',"",'} '),
	file_get_contents('linked.css')
	);

	// embed as a data: uri
	$base64css = rtrim(strtr(base64_encode($css), '+/', '-_'), '=');