It's crazy that 12.13.0 is now the latest long term support version of nodejs! At work today we discovered that when we all boot up a new terminal shell and run "node -v" to get the current node version, we would all get a different number! One person was on 12.13, one was on 11.15, one was on 10.something, and one guy was even using v6.4! We had to do  something about this madness

Good old AWS, the mercedes benz of cloud server hosts. I was at AWS today, and I got a better understanding of how to best run Ec2 servers to save in costs. ;)

I was having a hard time recently writing jest + enzyme unit tests for a react.js project, and one of my colleagues saved the day with the await / async addition. In this post I'll go through what I was doing, what I tried that didn't work, and what we ultimately went with that fixed everything!

Although I am a huge fan of lambda functions and s3 + cloudfront deployment stacks, in this current project I was using the botkit framework to make a slack chatbot. The framework is awesome, but the only catch was that it needs to be actually deployed on a real server so I had to put on my sys admin hat and fire up some ec2's. I ran into an interesting challenge in that the botkit server wants to run on localhost:3000, but in order to run it securely I need to use port 443. After unsuccessfully trying a few simpler hacks I bit the bullet and chose to use nginx as a reverse proxy here. I hadn't had much hands-on experience with nginx before this project so it was definitely a learning experience for me, and this post will be basically a walkthrough of the things I did to get it up and running.

My team and I are working on a React project that runs in regular browsers, and we recently decided to use Cypress for end to end testing. It has an actually surprisingly nice you can use to write describe-it style test scripts that will load up a browser with any page on your site, click some things, interact with the dom, and then even do assertions that your page renders correctly. You can do "cypress run" to run your tests via the command line or "cypress open" to start this little application from which you can run all tests or just specific tests, and it creates this little sidebar that gives you a history of the commands it's running and details about what happened when things have failed. Anyway, yes Cypress is awesome, but that's not what thing blog post was supposed to be about...