Launching a webservice: defining your MVP

When you have an idea for a webservice it’s easy to get lost into coding a lot of neat little features. But do you need all of them straight away? More often than not these features will cost you a lot of time to develop, while they might not even be the features your customer want. Wikipedia says: A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development.

The best boilerplate app is the one you code yourself

Boilerplate apps are great. They let you get your next project up and running quickly, and usually provide some form of structure you can follow. They can also, however, be a massive time-sink. We developers are curious by nature, and tend to have this thing where we want to know exactly how things run under the hood 🙈 In addition, boilerplates can be too minimalistic for your needs, or too much bloat.

Using Vue Components in your Express app

VueJS is awesome. Creating self contained components and compose them together in your pages makes so much sense, and therefore I’ve been using it extensively in my latest projects. However, sometimes you want (or need) to create a traditional app, and can’t use the SPA workflow development with hot reloading and .vue files. Or can you? 🤔 TL;DR: I’ve prepared a repo with the full example code in case you want to dive right in at Github

Exploring the wonderous world of image processing

I’ve always been intrigued by image processing. Especially by programs that can actually detect objects in images. However, I’ve never done anything serious with this except for the odd API calls to various Cloud based services like Google Vision, Watson or Clarifai. I always wanted to toy around with a library that makes these services tick, such as OpenCV, but it requires installing some OS specific tools and the whole thing always feels daunting so I never really got anywhere with this.

I made a tool to track your whole site's Pagespeed

At the office we usually take some time to optimise our client’s websites for Google Pagespeed. We got quite proficient in this and no what the common pitfalls and best practices are. However, I noticed we usually only do this for the homepage 🤔. This makes sense, as that’s usually the main page, but what about all the other pages. For instance, the order process pages or your contact form. Those are just as, if not more, important to load up quickly.

Sorting tags in Jekyll

On this blog I list all the used tags in the sidebar. I realised these tags were listed randomly so wanted to know if you could sort them alphabetically. Turns out you can. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); -- Tagging posts In your posts, make sure you tag your posts in the meta section: title: Your awesome titletags: - something - here - three Now, Jekyll is clever and knows about your tags and stores them in site.

Setting up Laravel with Docker Compose

When you work on multiple projects and run these locally through, for example, Apache this means you have to maintain and tweak your local server environment all the time. Additionally, when you work on that same project with multiple people, chances are your co-workers have a slightly different setup. These slight changes in set-up can be harmless, but more times than not, cause for developer headache or unwanted code-alterations to make it work.

Getting started with the PanResponder in React Native

Inside React Native you can use the PanResponder to recognise multi-touch gestures as well as swipes and other touches that make native apps feel snappy and intuitive. But getting it up and running can feel daunting and borderline black magic. In this post I’ll try and guide you through the process, hopefully demystifying it a bit and get you on track to awesomeness. What we will be making Obviously we’ll be wanting to focus on the PanResponder itself so UI wise this will be pretty barebones.

React Storybook

Recently React Storybook came out. It’s a tool to isolate your React Components to develop and design them outside of your app. In this post I’ll be going over how to get it set up. Why use it? What intrigued me about Storybook is the fact you can work on defining and designing your React components in an environment where you don’t have to worry about the app itself. In fact, by having them isolated you can make sure they work correctly by themselves and don’t rely on the rest of your application.

Getting your React Native App on an iOS device

As I was playing around with the awesome React Native library I encountered a few small hicups getting an app running on an actual device, so here’s how I made it work for me. At the time of writing I’ve tested the following with: OSX react-native 0.11.4 nodejs v4.1.1 XCode 7.0.1 I won’t go into much detail on how to get a React Native project going on your computer, as the nice guys at Facebook do an excellent job explaining this process.