Happy Almost Father's Day. I'm the proud father of eight kids and being a father makes me incredibly happy. Also scared, stressed, worried, and anxious, but all worth it. This week was pretty rough for me. Both my wife and I got sick early in the week (not Covid), and while I got better after twenty-four hours or so, I'm still not 100% right. Add the fact that we have a massive heat wave this week I've been sticking to the couch mostly, working on my Diablo 4 barb.

Adocasts for Learning Adonis

A few months ago I was introduced to Adonis. Adonis is a framework for building Node.js app and it comes with a heck of a lot of features. If Express is jQuery, Adonis is Vue+React+Everything Else. It's a very opinionated framework and that may turn some folks off, but from what I've seen so far it's really impressive. I haven't built a "server app" in nearly a decade. I've focused on Jamstack and serverless and just haven't needed one. While I don't see my "default" mindset changing, I can say Adonis has me excited and I'm hoping to build a few demos with it.

That being said, I did find the docs a bit hard to grok, specifically the lack of a proper "Getting Started" guide. The Adonis docs are extensive, but there's no real guide that walks you through building a simple application. That's where Adocasts come in. Adocasts is a set of video tutorials that helps bridge that gap in the Adonis docs. Even better, each video tutorial has a full transcription with code. I've not watched any of the videos and have just relied on the written form and the site has been invaluable for me.

Making a Network Request When Leaving a Page

Here's a great blog post by Alex MacArthur on how you can make a network request when a user leaves the page. He covers various methods and what works and what doesn't, and ends up on the sendBeacon API, a web feature I've yet to play with. Read more here: Reliably Send an HTTP Request as a User Leaves a Page

Working with Node's Test Runner

When I was first learning Python, one of the things I thought was really cool was the fact that testing was natively baked into the platform. Well, Node now has this too (as of version 20). Phil Nash on the Sonar blog wrote a great and simple-to-understand look at this new feature: Hands on with the Node.js test runner

As I said above, I don't really build Node.js applications much, but I write a heck of a lot of simple scripts and serverless stuff. The more the platform improves, the better my life gets!