Blog - kimserey lam

May 22, 2020

Vscode File Navigation Tips

Visual Studio Code is a free open source code editor. It comes packed with features and can also be extended with many extensions built by the community. Since its first launch five years ago, it has become the main editor to work on frontend projects like Angular or React projects. Because it is so quick and easy to use, we can get started straight away and build without having to explore much of its functionalities. But there are gems inside that if known, enhance drastically the productivity. In today’s post I will go through some file tips with Visual Studio Code version 1.44.2 which will boost productivity.

May 15, 2020

Deep Dive Into Ngif Structural Directive

Structural directives in Angular, like ngIf and ngFor are mysterious directives. They both come with custom notation in order to define the content of the directives for example *ngIf="abc else xyz" and *ngFor="let x of xs; let i=index; trackBy: trackBy. In today’s post we will demystify the notation of NgIf, called a microsyntax, by looking at how it can be used, and then reconstructing the directive ourselves.

May 08, 2020

Handlebars Built In Helpers

Handlebars is a simple template engine which we can use to generate HTML content or other text format. Being very quick to use and understand makes it an ideal tool for projects needing the most common statements like conditions or loops. In today’s post we will look into Handlebars built in helpers with example.

May 01, 2020

Unicode Explained

The step of translating text to binary format, called character encoding, is an important part of software development. Nowadays, we have some reminiscence of the ASCII code but majority of the systems default to UTF-8. In today’s post we will be looking at what the ASCII, Unicode and UTF-8 are.

Apr 22, 2020

Event Sourcing With Equinox

One of the concept which gained a lot of traction from the last five years is Event Sourcing. Event Sourcing changes the way data are handled, how data are stored, and how perception of the current state is constructed. In this post, we will explain what is Event Sourcing and will see how it can implement using Equinox, a .NET implementation of an event store.

Apr 17, 2020

Figma Constraints

Few weeks ago we looked into the auto layout feature of Figma to create flexible layout which adapt to new elements placed into them and allow to automatically arrange elements while maintaining padding and alignment. Another great feature of Figma used to handle placement of elements within a frame is to use constraints. Constraints in Figma come in multiple format, in today’s post we will explore each one of them and understand how they are used.

Apr 10, 2020

Figma Color Palette

Last week we talked about Figma auto layout and how it allowed us to automatically place elements in a design. In today’s post, we will look at how we can define a color palette which can then be used throughout our design.

Apr 03, 2020

Figma Auto Layout

Figma is a collaborative design tool that comes with a Free tier pricing for 3 projects and 2 editors. It comes with a full suite of features that allows us to create reusable designs and makes it easy to iterate on the designs. One of the features provided is the auto layout. In today’s post we will look into Figma auto layout feature and how it can be used to design components.

Mar 27, 2020

Kafkacat The Cli For Kafka

Kafka is a widely used message broker platform. Althought very powerful, developping and testing applications that consume or produce Kafka messages can be really painful. In today’s post we will look at kafkacat, a command line tool that will make our life easier when interacting with Kafka.

Mar 20, 2020

Frontend Testing Fundamentals With Cypress

Cypress is a end to end frontend testing tool which simulates user navigation while running in browser. Few weeks ago we discovered the fundamentals of it, how we could install it and how we could create custom commands for it. The trick with testing is to find the right balance between not enough tests and too many tests. Not enough tests would yield less confidence in code changes while too many tests will yield more maintainance hassle. Therefore what we really want is to focus on specific aspects of our application that if properly tested will ensure that the quality remains. Today we will look at three of the main pillars, the routes, the posts and the displays.

Mar 13, 2020

Recursive Query In Sqlite With Cte

Few months ago we talked about the Basket of Apple problem where we represented a tree of rules to distribute apples in baskets. Trees are quite common in software, a simpler example is the example of managers and employees where employees can be managers and managers themselves can have managers. In today’s post, we will look at how we can represent a tree structure in SQLite and how we can retrieve the nodes of a tree using Common Table Expressions (CTE).

Mar 06, 2020

Full Text Search With Sqlite

Full text search allows users to search records in data storage using properties of the objects. For example a full text search on a blog engine could allow a user to search for a post based on the title or content of the post or categories. The text provided could be a word, or a sentence or part of a sentence and the result would be a list of posts ranked by best match. In today’s post we will look at how we can take implement fts using SQLite built in fts5 module.

Feb 28, 2020

Python Unit Test

Unit tests ensure that the functionalities of the Software are maintained while developping new features. Every language provides library for writing unit tests, and any decent framework provides facilities to enable easy unit testing. In Python the core comes packed with unittest, a module providing all the necessary functuonalities to unit test our application. In today’s post we will look at how we can setup unittest for our Python application.

Feb 21, 2020

Cypress Commands

Few weeks ago we looked at Cypress, we looked into how we could install it, the different assertion we could use and how we could debug the tests. In today’s post, we will look at how we can create reusable commands to be used across all integration tests.

Feb 14, 2020

Manage Windows On Macos With Amethyst

When I first moved to MacOS, the first thing I looked for was a window manager. There were few paid options but one of them, Amethyst, striked me as a free open source window manager. In today’s post I’ll share my setup of Amethyst together with the shortcuts I use most in order to manage my windows.