Last 2 weeks it was ‘ateliermiddag’ again at the Prins Mauritschool in Rijswijk. These events are organised multiple times per year and the pupils of the school can do various small workshops. Together with other dads I’ve lready given a Scratch ‘programming’ course a few times in recent years. With an emphasis on the creative side to ensure that the younger pupils could join as well. It’s always been a great success.

Working professionally everyday with Gitlab has made me think twice of hosting my blog on an isolated Digital Ocean Droplet. Especially as we are promoting Devops and Continuous Delivery (for which I’ve been attending a training by Jez Humble last week!) So I’ve converted my blog to use Gitlab Pages. This means my entire blog resides in texfiles in Gitlab(.com) and whenever I push a new version of the code, the Gitlab runners build my blog using a Static Site Generator (Hexo).

Als je er op gaat letten, is het opvallend dat kinderboeken zo vol staan met stereotiepe rolpatronen. Stichting Zo-ook heeft hier onderzoek naar gedaan en wil kennis en bewustwording vergroten en ook het aanbod niet-stereotiepe kinderboeken vergroten. Daarom zijn zij pas geleden met een crowdfunding campagne gestart om het uitgeven van een boek met niet-stereotiepe rolpatronen mogelijk te maken. Zij willen hiermee laten zien dat het ook anders kan. Niet met het argument dat het ene rolpatroon goed is en het andere slecht, maar om ervoor zorgen dat kinderen meerdere rolpatronen zien, dat ze andere rolmodellen zien.

{% codeblock [First code] [lang:bash] %} var express = require(‘express’, template = require(‘pug’)); var session = require(‘express-session’) var util = require(‘util’); var oauth = require(‘oauth’); {% endcodeblock %} So what is this? It is the first code I used for the backend part of our project at the ING Hackathon 2017 in Katowice, Poland. It was held at Walcownia Cynku,a former Zinc rolling Mill (big scary machines!). The logo I was part of a team of 6 people and we had a great time.

Currently I am working on a project where we need to create Excel reports from a datasource. There are several ways to do this programmatically, but our first thought was to do this in Java. We actually abandoned this path later on and went for something with Nodejs, but I’ll share my thoughts on the Java road nonetheless. There are several Java libraries available which enable read-write of Excel sheet formats.

I truly believe coding software should be part of the curriculum of young people. Kids can learn to express themselves digitally. Currently the primary school that my kids attend does not have resources for this kind of tuition. So I decided to offer my assistance in organising two courses (2x 2 hours) in Scratch programming. Scratch is a visual programming language designed by MIT media labs in 2003. The kids were able to create some nice games in that timeframe!

I have started a small github project for hosting a demo test. In this project there is an Appium test for the TodoMVC app we built in earlier posts and this test can be run on Sauce Labs with accompanying scripts. First thing is to get a trial account at Sauce Labs. BTW, Sauce Labs, Inc. is at Microsoft’s Build conference right now and they have announced better support for Visual Studio (with a plugin) and the fact that Microsoft itself is going to support the same automation API (the JSON Wire Protocol).

By choosing for Cordova as an App container, most developers aim to build an app that should run on the iOS and Android platform from one codebase. In the last post I demonstrated how to embed a javascript React App in Cordova on the Android platform, now I will do so for iOS (on a Mac). A quick recap to make this work (repeating steps from former posts): In Part1 and Part2 (Android version) I used the ‘npm start’ command to create the concatenated javascript file bundle.

When I wrote this part of the series, I started it on a Mac. Along the way I had to write some of it on a different computer, running Linux. So I decided to change the contents a bit of this post. I will still get the App in a container, but I will show it to you for the Android platform as well as iOS. Part 2 will therefore be split in two (an Android part and and iOS part).

Everyone knows Facebook, the biggest social-networking site. It is one of the largest sites of the planet. For years they have run their site on a customized version of PHP, named Hack. Not so long ago they switched to an internal product for parts of their site. This product is called React, it is a JavaScript framework. It’s star rose quickly internally. The crux of the product is that it is a component-based, decoupled way of developing software, which is based on the best ideas from computer science about good design.