50 Lines of Code

My ramblings on Software Engineering, Open Source and Software Quality

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2019 - a retrospective

Looking back to 2019 and a look forward :)
Go back in time with me

Reading local files with JavaScript

If your web app needs access to files on the user's device, there is no direct access possible for security and privacy reasons. But using file input elements and the FileReader interface, we can still let the user select files for us to access.
Check the article for the examples

A look at how I build stuff

Last week I got inspired to learn about the Web Authentication API and write a WordPress plugin to use it for 2FA. I wanted to use the opportunities to explain how I usually build stuff and learn along the way.
Check the article for more

My Google I/O 2019 wrap up

This year I was at my second I/O and had the huge honour to give two talks, three office hours and meet so many of you lovely folks!
Check the article for links and selfies

The greatest

JavaScript in parallel: Web Workers, Transferrable Objects and SharedArrayBuffers

JavaScript is single-threaded, which means that long-running tasks can make our web application unresponsive. Luckily, we have Web Workers as a remedy for this - but they do require some thought on how to divide a task and how to avoid a hefty memory cost when data is copied.
This article shows how to use Web Workers and transferrable objects and a new parallel primitive: The SharedArrayBuffer. Click here to read more!

CORS - a guided tour

When making network requests in the browser to other pages or APIs, the browser enforces the Same-origin policy to protect users and their data.
But what if we want to request data from another origin? Or if we want to run an API that isn't on the same domain? Let's see what CORS is and how we can use it.
Click here to read more!

Easy scaling with Docker, HAProxy and confd

Forrest is a very small shell script that binds together etcd and docker to allow easy scaling - for example with the combination of etcd + confd + HAProxy + Docker you can quickly and easily spin up a new web server instance and hook it into your load balancer.
Find out more

Running your meteor.js application on your own server

Meteor gives you the possibility to bundle your app as a (more or less) self-contained node.js app, you could as well run it on your own server. In this article I�ll give a quick run-through on how to do that.
Read more...

Look ma, no canvas! Server-side 3D rendering with node.js and Three.js

If you wonder if and how you can render a Three.js 3D scene using node.js on the server, you may have been thinking about using a canvas module, such as Automattic/Canvas or run a headless browser such as Phantom or even a full-blown Firefox or Chrome on xvfb.
Read more about the headless renderer here!