Evan Lecklider

Latest — 20 Dec 2019

Building JavaScript with Make

Make (or GNU Make)’s basic value proposition is that it will generate files based on other files. How those files are generated is up to you, but that’s part of what’s great about Make: anything that you can do on the shell can be scripted in Make,

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Decorating Ruby's Net::HTTP for Fun and Profit

Ruby's Net::HTTP library gets a bad wrap, somewhat appropriately, for being opaque and cumbersome to implement in any meaninful way. It works but it is gruesome to write every time you need to get data from a remote host. Obviously there are a zillion HTTP wrappers already

Array-like Objects in Ruby with Forwardable

A couple of times recently I've needed something that behaved like and array, but with some extra methods that are specific to the context of the list I'm dealing with. For example, an array of transactions with a couple of extra methods for common queries I

Better Low-Level Error Handling with Puma

Puma has a neat little method you can call to override the behavior when it encounters an error in the Rack application it's running. If you've ever been running a Ruby application on Puma and seen the "call your local MayTag repairman" error message

Strong Parameters in Sinatra

A while ago a concept called "Strong Parameters" was added to Ruby on Rails, the general idea of which was to explicitly allow or deny parameters passing into your application code. Since most of my work right now is in Sinatra, I was interested in creating something similar

Simple JavaScript Internationalization

I found myself in need of a really simple implementation of I18n in JavaScript, but without a ton of overhead because the use case was pretty straightforward. I really just want to be able to do this in my form handlers: return i18n.forms.numberPatternMismatch; So, I decided to extract

Parsing GET Parameters in JavaScript

Pretty simple way to parse query string parameters into an object for access in JavaScript. /* * Params.js * * Super simple parser of query string parameters. * Creates a variable 'params' on the 'window' object. */ (function () { var params = {}, capture = void 0, query = window.location.search.substring(1), whitespace = /\+/g,

Transparent Proxy Detection in JavaScript

I recently found myself on the receiving end of a transparent proxy. It wasn't a nefarious hacking attempt, simply a product demonstration from a partner's potential vendor, but it was disconcerting. Another website was pretending to be my company's site and if this site

Customizing Native Form Validation

JavaScript form validation is pretty awesome. If you add <input type='email'> to your document, the browser will check the user's input against what it considers a valid email format and (unless you're in Safari) prevent the form from submitting if the

Dumb Grids with Susy

Susy might be my new favorite thing… at least in CSS. I say "dumb grids" with nothing but love, because in this case "dumb" means "not too magic and easy to grok". Without providing any configuration to Susy you can do this: .container { @include