Capybara, aside from being the largest rodent in the world, is also a fantastic tool to aid you in interacting with browser functionality in your code, either for testing or just to interact with or scrape data from a website. Capybara isn’t what actually interacts with the website — rather, it’s a layer that sits between you and the actual ...

Blogs have become an essential component of  corporate websites. This is why every major and minor CMS now offer an integrated or independent blog as a default option. For many new developers, the functionality of the blogs remains a mystery. Blogs have become so tightly integrated with the overall structure of the CMS (especially WP, Joomla and Drupal) that it ...

In this post I’ll touch on the emergence of JavaScript reactive streams. We’ll look at a cool online interactive tool that is useful for checking behavior of stream operators. I’ll finish by showing six RxJs JSFiddle examples that you can run and modify. Background Rich applications, such as modern SPAs, deal in state changes due to events. We’re accustomed to ...

Last week we hosted a Game of Thrones based intro to Cypher at the Women Who Code London meetup and in preparation had to scrape the wiki to build a dataset. I’ve built lots of datasets this way and it’s a painless experience as long as the pages make liberal use of CSS classes and/or IDs. Unfortunately the Game of ...

This story started with me wanting to write a steganography tool. Steganography is the process of hiding information inside a file, typically an image. To do that, I had to write an image decoder first because you can’t just start changing random bytes. All that will do is make the image invalid or corrupt. I selected PNG as the image ...

A common misconception is that Docker is only for creating single-process or single-service containers. While it’s true that the Dockerfile and docker run command options are designed for running a single process, that doesn’t mean that Docker itself doesn’t allow for a multi-process Docker container. In fact, Docker’s documentation has a very useful tutorial on how to run multi-process containers ...

Cookies are an important part of php and web development in general. Since http is a stateless protocol (This means that the server forgets each client after a connection), web developers need a way to store user preferences or allow their scripts to remember details about each client.  Cookies take on to solve this problem. (There are other solutions like ...

As a software developer, you have to become comfortable with the fact that your work is never truly done. The software you create will always be a work in progress. When you code that last feature or fix that last bug, another one will pop up soon enough. Also, as you keep learning, you’ll find better patterns that you want ...

The majority of the web sites have a page where they display a great amount of images. These pages are the well known gallery or portfolio pages. In this example I’m going to show you how you can use a bootstrap template to those pages.                 1. Get a template In this example we are ...