Writing

Blog Posts

Getting Your Macro on with DOSKEY

I'm a big fan of the command line (much to the mirth of some of my co-workers). I do a lot of stuff through Git, Grunt and the like so I've usually got a Cmder window open somewhere. When using Git, there are a bunch of commands that I use frequently so it’s handy to have a shortcut to these. DOSKEY is a Windows…

Mocking Angular’s $http Promise return type

The Angular $http service provides an easy way to interact with an API endpoint. If you want to query some data, you can simply do this: var request = $http.get('/api/items'); request.success(function (data) { console.log('I have data', data); }); The request object above is an Angular HTTP promise (ng.IHttpPromise…

Your Developers are Miserable and Are Going to Quit

Dear Software Development Managers, I've been lucky enough to work with a fair few development teams over the years, both here and in Canada (you'd have to ask them if that feeling is reciprocated). As well as getting involved with some good projects and taking part in a multitude of technical discussions, I've also…

Create a Grunt meta-runner in TeamCity

As much as all the cool kids are now using Gulp, I'm still using Grunt for a few few automated tasks. In our current project, we're using it to compress all of our JS in the project, run the Jasmine tests through Karma, and generate test code coverage reports. As well as doing this locally, we need to be able to…

Create a Scratch Branch in Git

Sometimes it gets to 4:59 on a Friday and you've got a bunch of files you've been mucking around with but don't really want to commit. This could be because you're just using throwaway code or because you've made changes to existing files that you don't want to break. In these circumstances, you have a few…