A Quick Update

This year, I really wanted to work on my output, and I think I’m doing pretty well. Here are some things that I’ve been publishing: Regular monthly blog posts on yakushima.blog A few posts this year on the Geolonia blog for work However, updates on this personal blog has been not so great – the previous post is the “2023 review” post, after all. I’ve been updating this blog from 2012, when we officially incorporated Flagship.

Playing around with AWS Certificate Manager

February 9, 2016

I’m a big Let’s Encrypt fan. They provide free SSL certificates for your web servers so you can protect the traffic from prying eyes. In fact, the connection between your web browser and my blog server is made private thanks to Let’s Encrypt. Using Let’s Encrypt requires some setup and automation on your part if you want to use it in the AWS cloud, but AWS recently launched something called the AWS Certificate Manager or “ACM”.

JavaScript Unit Tests in a Phoenix Application

February 8, 2016

There’s a guide to writing browser acceptance tests for Phoenix. Acceptance tests are nice, but sometimes you want to have unit tests. This is very easy to do with your Elixir code, but what about your JavaScript code that lives inside your Phoenix application? I couldn’t find a good guide on this, so I’ll go over what I have set up for one of my latest Phoenix projects. Setup First, install mocha if you haven’t already.

Elixir's StringIO may not be what you think it is

January 23, 2016

In Ruby, there is a very handy class called StringIO. Basically, it allows you to treat a string like you would an IO object, such as an open file, etc. Very useful for in-memory “files” that you may not want to write to a temporary file. In Elixir, there is a module called StringIO in the standard library. At first glance, these seem pretty similar: Ruby: Pseudo I/O on String object.

Web Development Tools: Mailtrap

January 19, 2016

This is the inaugural article of my “Web Development Tools” series I plan on continuing for at least a few more posts, sharing some of the essential tools I use for web development every day. When I have the chance to work with new people, we always exchange useful information about the tools and libraries we use. This series is an attempt to organize this information. Today’s pick: Mailtrap Once upon a time, I was working on a 2.

Brutal Simplicity

January 13, 2016

My favorite pizza is the pizza Margherita. Any pizzeria I go to, I will order the Margherita first. Why? It’s brutally simple. Four ingredients: dough, tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, basil. I wish more websites and applications would be like a good Margherita. Simple. Delicious. ????

Homebrew and PostgreSQL 9.5 (or 9.6)

January 9, 2016

Edit Sept. 30 2016: PostgreSQL 9.6 was released today, and these instructions should work – just replace 9.4 with 9.5 and 9.5 with 9.6. I also have a guide using pg_upgradecluster on Ubuntu. PostgreSQL 9.5 was released on Jan. 7, with lots of exciting new features. I wrote a post about upgrading from 9.3 to 9.4 in the past, and many people found it useful, so I decided to update it a bit for the 9.

.gitignore と .gitignore_global の分け方

January 5, 2016

(If you aren’t interested in my posts written in Japanese, please subscribe to the “English” feed.) Git のレポジトリーの中の .gitignore というのは、レポジトリーにコミットしない（無視する）ファイルを定義するものです。 Git の

Elixir Pattern Matching in Anonymous Funs

January 3, 2016

filter_zed_by = "1" list = [ %{"a" => "1", "b" => "2"}, %{"a" => "1", "b" => "5"}, %{"a" => "2", "b" => "5"}, %{"z" => "1", "x" => "2"} ] Enum.filter list, fn %{"z" => ^filter_zed_by} -> true _ -> false end # => [%{"z" => "1", "x" => "2"}] case in a fun is usually redundant if is even worse keep it simple

Hosting a Single-Page App on S3, with proper URLs

November 24, 2015

Note (2019/07/05): I’ve posted a follow-up to this post about limitations about the technique used here, especially when hosting an API on the same domain. Amazon S3 is a great place to store static files. You might want to even serve a single-page application (SPA) written in JavaScript there. When you’re writing a single-page app, there are a couple ways to handle URLs: A) http://example.com/#!/path/of/resource B) http://example.com/path/of/resource A is easy to serve from S3.

Podcasts I'm Listening To (November 2015 Edition)

November 23, 2015

My wife Naoko wrote a reply to this post. It was fun comparing how different the podcasts we listen to are. :) First, I’d like to plug a podcast that I’m a semi-regular guest on, techsTalking(5417), a podcast where technology people just talk about whatever is on our mind. Here are some other podcasts that I’m currently subscribed to: The Incomparable -- a podcast about anything geeky. Star Wars? Check. Star Trek?