Interactive Rebasing in Git

This post is a quick look at one of my favorite features in Git, interactive rebases.  I like this feature because it lets you do two conflicting things: make micro commits (like saving every couple of  minutes when editing a Word doc) so you can replay your work, and always go back to a working state of your code, and making clean, well worded, self contained commits to a project repo.  Interactive rebasing lets you squish your commits together when you are ready to share them.

A Look at Git Hashes

Git is a locally stored database with integrity guarantees. To get  a feel for how this works, this post takes a look at a very simple repository using the commands hash-object and cat-file. Although these are not commands you would normally use (they are among the "plumbing commands" that lie behind the "porcelain commands" like clone and commit), they are very helpful for inspecting the objects that a Git repository manages.

Looking at 'this' in JavaScript

JavaScript looks a lot like C#. But the internal plumping is utterly different. I've always found this somewhat befuddling. As a C# developer, you kind of think you know how things are working, but often you don't. Which makes figuring out what's happening when things are not working really challenging. I've just started reading a book in Kyle Simpson's (@getify) accurately titled series, You Don't Know JavaScript, a slim monograph on this & Object Prototypes, and things are kind of clearer. Kind of.

Node.js Development with Visual Studio Code

Last weekend I took my first steps in Node.js development, adding a small feature to a Hexo plugin. Hexo, as I blogged last week, is a static site generator written in Node.js, to which I am planning to migrate this blog. I made good progress as first, but soon required a debugger, and took the opportunity to learn the basics of VS Code as a Node editor and debugger. This article will walk through the basics of environment set up and debugging with VS Code.

Hexo, a Node.js Blog Platform

It's been five years since I wrote my first blog post, a look at XSLT that still gets pretty good traffic. I chose Blogger because it was free and easy, and the fact Google owned it gave me some confidence it would stick around.  But it's been feeling like less and less of a good fit recently.