Creating website screenshots with Python and pyppeteer

pyppeteer is a Python port of a headless Chromium browser automation library puppeteer. It is a very useful tool in general and can be used to perform a number of tasks like web scraping, automation and making website screenshots! The advantage of using an actual browser to create website screenshots is clear: it gives us […]

Get some beautiful programming fonts for your editor and terminal in Fedora

The best way to choose a font is to see it in action. Let’s head over to Programming fonts where we can select from 90+ fonts and apply it to syntax-highlighted code snippets in different programming languages. I personally quite like Hack and JetBrains Mono which are excellent fonts for programming and look great on […]

First impressions from using Tailwind CSS

I have been writing web templates using HTML and CSS for over 10 years. I am no expert or at least I stopped being one with the rapid development of CSS 3 and all the nice things modern browsers support nowadays. I have also never been a strictly frontend developer, so I don’t follow the […]

Building command line interfaces in Python

It is very useful to be able to create command line interfaces for our programs. There are several situations in which we want to do that: Building standalone command-line applications like file managers, editors and other full-featured apps Building one-off automated scripts which can run multiple tasks and take complex parameters Creating utility tools that […]

Deployment with Fabric

Fabric is an awesome tool written in Python that we can utilize to execute shell commands on a remote computer via SSH, so any commands we would run locally on our computer we can run on remote servers without much effort. The way this works is that we will create a local utility program where […]

Digital nomading in Prague, Czech republic (like a local)

I am Czech, I have lived in Prague for roughly 2 years and I keep coming back to our capital from time to time, basically living like a nomad in a place that I know well. So I decided to help foreigners to get some basic idea about digital nomading here. Keep in mind that […]

Recording terminal sessions with asciinema

Asciinema is a simple, but powerful tool that we can use to record our terminal sessions, in other words we can make “videos” of what we are doing on the command line and share it with others. How does it work? Asciinema is a session recorder, web player and a website that work together to […]

Using Docker to provision databases for development and testing

Containers are all the rage now, but is there any reason to put database servers in containers? I personally don’t really see any reasons to put database servers in docker containers for “normal” production systems (exceptions exist), because I think that if we can avoid unnecessary layer in running software, we should. When it comes […]

Interactive Computing with Jupyter Notebooks

What is Interactive Computing? Interactive computing is a fancy term for programming where we issue commands to a running program and get results right away. Examples of Interactive Computing: spreadsheet applications REPL (Read Eval Print Loop): interactive language shells editor plugins that run the code or tests as we type and display results Jupyter Notebooks […]

Fixing wi-fi after Fedora update on Thinkpad X1 Carbon 7th gen

I recently bought Thinkpad X1 Carbon, the latest 7th generation laptop from Lenovo, but unfortunately not everything works so smoothly yet on Fedora linux. I installed a new Fedora 30 and discovered some not-so-serious glitches, which are sometimes to be expected with new hardware on linux. But then I updated all my packages and BIOS […]

Automation with shell scripts

What is a shell? Shell is a term to describe computer interfaces that we use to interact with our operating system. Shells can be graphical or text based using a command line. We are typically using a graphical user interface, in other words a graphical shell to control the computer. When we open a command […]

Debugging Python programs

There are different ways to debug Python programs, from printing information to the console using basic print() function to using a full-fledged debugger. In this article we will have a look at some basic tools that we can use, including less known tools like PySnooper or stackprinter. I have created an accompanying repository python-debugging with […]

Measuring Python code complexity with wily

It is good to have some idea about our code complexity. This is especially true for large codebases and large teams where complexity can seriously slow down development and introduce bugs. Every developer probably has some opinion whether a particular code or project is complex, but what if we want to express it with some […]

One year with Vue.js

Okay, okay, it’s been more than a year, but I couldn’t resist the title. Sorry! This is a write-up about how I started with Vue.js and how I use it to develop my side project.

Digital nomading in October in Thessaloniki, Greece

Travel & what to see Thessaloniki is the second largest city in Greece, it is a student city full of bars and tavernas. The most known site is the White Tower which houses a little museum about the city’s history and a roof with 360° view. You can take a little boat ride around the […]

Writing test cases with given, when and then

At my previous workplace we worked with Groovy and Grails and I had the opportunity to use testing framework for Groovy called Spock. Spock uses labels to divide test cases into different blocks. That way, data definition and final asserts are separated from the code under test, which is typically a function or a method […]

Convert Markdown text to HTML and to plaintext in JavaScript

Let’s create a small JavaScript module that will be able to convert formatted text in Markdown to HTML and to plaintext. I chose Marked.js as my library of choice because with this library it is very easy to modify the output. Here is our basic module to convert Markdown to HTML:

import marked from "marked"

const mdOptions = {
  // whether to conform to original MD implementation
  pedantic: false,
  // Github Flavoured Markdown
  gfm: true,
  // tables extension
  tables: true,
  // smarter list behavior
  smartLists: true,
  // "smart" typographic punctuation for things like quotes and dashes
  smartypants: true,
  // sanitize HTML tags
  sanitize: true,
  // ... other options
}

export function convertToHTML(markdownText) {
  marked.setOptions(mdOptions)
  return marked(markdownText)
}

import marked from "marked"

const mdOptions = {

// whether to conform to original MD implementation

pedantic: false,

// Github Flavoured Markdown

gfm: true,

// tables extension

tables: true,

// smarter list behavior

smartLists: true,

// "smart" typographic punctuation for things like quotes and dashes

smartypants: true,

// sanitize HTML tags

sanitize: true,

// ... other options

}

export function convertToHTML(markdownText) {

marked.setOptions(mdOptions)

return marked(markdownText)

}

As we can […]

Why I chose MailerLite instead of MailChimp

I was recently building a product launch page for Contact Cache and I wanted to allow people to sign up for product announcements and news. I’ve never collected email addresses or mass-emailed people before. And because I am not heavily involved in marketing, I didn’t know much about the state of email marketing platforms today. […]

Introducing Contact Cache

It has been more than a year since I wanted to have some sort of “personal relationship manager”. In other words I needed a tool to write down notes about people since I am always forgetful. And since at that time I didn’t find anything satisfactory, I decided to build an app for myself that […]

Flask API Quickstart Application with JSON Web Tokens, SQLAlchemy and Pytest

I created a sample Flask application that shows how to create HTTP API with authentication provided by JSON Web Tokens. It can be used to learn a bit about Flask, SQLAlchemy, JSON Web Tokens, Pytest and how it all works together. In particular, it shows how to: hash passwords using bcrypt issue and verify JWT […]