Kent Brewster kentbrew

Sorting a JSON Object by Key Name

While performing eyeball-based QA for an API update I needed a fast way to reformat output so that all keys would be in the same order. Here's what I came up with:

sortByKeys = input => {
  // default: return anything whose typeof is NOT "object"
  let result = input;
  // do we have an object? look inside
 if (input &amp;&amp; typeof input === "object") {

Hiding Ads from All Facebook Advertisers who have Added You From a Contact List

Here's a scary page:

https://www.facebook.com/ads/preferences/?entry_product=ad_settings_screen

Open up the Advertisers section and check out that first section: advertisers who use a contact list added to Facebook. Unlike the other tabs in this section, these ads have nothing to do with your behavior on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet. All these advertisers got your name the old-fashioned way: by trading something of value for a list containing your contact information.

Per Facebook's vague-but-cheerful explainer, this is "typically" your e-mail address or phone number, but there's really no way to know for sure.

Here's a doc we never published while I was at Pinterest. Some or all of it may be useful; please keep in mind that I've been ex-Pinterest since March 2022 and cannot help if it doesn't work.

I apologize in advance for the chirpy Pinterest editorial tone throughout; it's a Thing there.

How To Get Your Stuff On Pinterest

Hi, all. Kent Brewster here, oldest surviving engineer at Pinterest. For the past ten years we've been working on a handful of things that help people who love Pinterest find new inspiration from the Web and share it as easily as possible.

These things are:

Finding Twitter User IDs

User accounts on Twitter are commonly identified by screen name, which may be changed by operators when they take over an account, or have been sitting on an old account for a long time and want to transition it into malicious use.

User IDs, however, are permanent. There are several services out there that will try to find them for you but it seems like a bad idea to me, since you're alerting them to the fact that there's something interesting about this account. There's also plenty of bad advice that uses many long-since-abandoned Twitter API endpoints.

As of this writing (2018-02-18) you can view source and search for /profile_banners/, which will show something like this:

.enhanced-mini-profile .mini-profile .profile-summary {

How to Change your Chrome Default Language

Open up a Terminal window. (If you have never seen Terminal before, go to Spotlight Search and type "Terminal.")

In the Terminal box, try this:

defaults read com.google.Chrome AppleLanguages

If you see this:

Old School:

  var clean = function (input) {
    var testMe = input, dupeTest = '';
    while (testMe !== dupeTest) {
      testMe = new DOMParser().parseFromString(testMe, "text/html").documentElement.textContent;
      dupeTest = testMe;
    }
    testMe = testMe.replace(/</g, '&lt;');

return testMe;

This is pretty damn cool:

http://www.webtigerteam.com/websearch/websearch.js

I wonder if it would be demonstrably better if case-hardened?

	// Fill blank image TITLE attributes with what's in their ALT attribute, if found.

	((w, d) => {
	let $ = {
	// w = window
	w: w,
	// d = document
	d: d,
	f: {
	// return an event's target element

	const BLOCK_ME = "://www.facebook.com/tr/";

	chrome.webRequest.onBeforeRequest.addListener(
	function(r) {
	return {
	cancel: r.url.indexOf(BLOCK_ME) != -1
	};
	},
	{urls: ["<all_urls>"]},
	["blocking"]