Make Node.js debugging easier with colorful log messagesTech by Sunny Srinidhi - January 8, 2017February 9, 20170 I’m working on my second project in Node.js. I kind of love it. I haven’t yet decided to find out how better it performs compared to apps written in other languages, such as PHP, or Java. But writing Node.js apps is fun, mostly because you can get npm packages for almost everything you need during development. This helps you concentrate on the business logic and not worry about writing basic boilerplate code. What’s the advantage? Well, you can write a POC/MVP app really quickly. Anyway, one thing I noticed while working on the previous Node.js app was that debugging is a bit difficult if you, like me, have an obsession with having proper log messages everywhere. So one of the first
/public/api/v1.2.3.4.5/login — Don’t do this!RantsTech by Sunny Srinidhi - September 7, 2016February 9, 20170 If you are anything like me, or tens of thousands of others working in the web development domain, you know what the title means. We are going to talk about the widely debated “v” in API endpoints. Do I like it? Well, obviously not. I’ll tell you why. 1. It’s ugly! It makes reading documentations very difficult, because you’ll need to version your document as well. And you’ll have to make sure you are using the latest document, or the document that’s relevant to the version of API you are consuming. Wouldn’t it be a lot easier if you had one version of API and one version of documentation? I know what people over at the other camp are shouting — your APIs will change and
It’s time to move your platform to RESTful APIsTech by Sunny Srinidhi - August 21, 2016February 9, 20170 If you are into tech, there’s a good chance you already know what’s a web API. All the cool kids use it these days. It’s the new kid on the block. And it’s sexy with well defined features. Web APIs aren’t necessarily new, they’ve been around for a while. Even RESTful APIs aren’t that young. But that’s not what we are here to talk about. We are here to see why it’s time to move your platform to a more modern architecture which exposes a bunch of (RESTful) APIs for the rest of the world to add value to your platform. As a person who’s been producing and consuming APIs for the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of them. I’ve
Why I love curly bracketsRantsTech by Sunny Srinidhi - August 19, 2016February 9, 20170 Curly brackets. Well, what can I say about them? They sure do have curves! And such curves, I’m addicted! I’ve been abusing them for as long as I remember. I abuse them even today. The day I saw a piece of code for the first time, over a decade ago, I knew I’d be using those curly brackets for the rest of my life. I’m talking about curly brackets in function definitions, loops, conditional statements. I wrote my first ever program in C. As you might have guessed, it was a simple Hello, World! program. I’m not going to talk about the awesome, exciting, orgasmic, feeling that your first ever program gives you. We’ve all been through that. I’m going to
Importance of proper documentation in a projectRantsTech by Sunny Srinidhi - August 17, 2016January 9, 20201 In the tech industry, it’s not uncommon for developers to work on project maintenance. You could be asked to fix a few bugs in a system which is already in production and has a user base. Or to add new features, or to refactor. Sometimes, you’d even be asked to rewrite the whole project in a different language/framework. For all these, it’s very important to setup the existing code on your development machine, and understand it properly. And for this, you need proper documentation. Most projects today have their own git repository. It’s very unlikely that a project is distributed within a team by copying it on to a storage device. Even your incomplete, two-year old pet projects are usually on