Experiments at work

In my previous article, WebRTC - What the heck? , we met two shopkeeper farmers, John and Finch, who trade goods across a river using detailed letters (SDPs). If you haven't read it, I'd strongly recommend you read that first. I promised we'd get into the technicals. Here it is. But don't worry, no code. We're sticking with John and Finch to understand what really happens under the hood. The postal service - Signaling server In the first article, Finch sent his letter via a pigeon. But John and Finch can't just throw letters across the river and hope it lands. Someone has to carry the letter. That's the postal service. It doesn't read the letter. It doesn't care what's inside. It just delivers. In WebRTC, this is the Signaling Server . It carries the SDP offer from one client to the other and brings back the SDP answer. It could be a WebSocket server, an HTTP server, or anything that can pass a message between two endpoints. WebRTC doesn...

A while ago, we were working on an SDK, and some third-party developers who used our SDK reached out with an interesting request. We used to maintain extensive documentation in our GitHub Wiki, and they wanted to stay updated every time something changed in it. They didn't want to manually check the wiki every day, and GitHub doesn't send email notifications for wiki changes.  This got me digging around, and that's when I discovered something pretty cool - GitHub has Atom feeds for almost everything! Commits, releases, tags, and yes, even wiki changes. I tried it out myself and suggested the same to them. Problem solved, and I thought, why not share this little gem with everyone? /**  * @disclaimer  * This post covers GitHub's publicly available Atom feeds  * These feeds work for public repositories  * For private repos, you'll need authentication  * Please feel free to leave comments if I've missed something */ What are Atom Feeds? Atom feeds are XML-based...

This interesting thing came up with one of our libraries that a colleague found out when he got stuck. I am just here to amplify and talk about it. The Problem: The issue was related to the server-side rendering of a react application. When attempting to render a page on the server side, one of our internal libraries kept giving a "not defined" error on the window object causing a failure in the server-side rendering of a page. This was the code that caused the "not defined" error: Now, before getting into what's wrong with the above code, we need to understand the difference between "undefined" and "not defined" in Javascript. "undefined" vs "not defined" When a variable is declared but is not initialised to any value, then by default it holds "undefined" as the value. This "undefined" is one of the primitive data types in Javascript that is used as a default value for a declared but not initialised va...

Back with another git magic. When it comes to merging a pull request on Github, there are two options Rebase and Merge Squash and Merge What is Rebase and Merge? When one chooses Rebase and Merge, all the commits in the PR are added to the target branch. For example, if the PR has 5 commits, all of those commits will be visible in the PR history of the target branch. What is Squash and Merge? When a PR is merged by choosing Squash and Merge, all the commits in the PR are combined into one PR and then added to the target branch. Once again, if the PR has 5 commits or any number of commits, they are combined and added to the target branch. Therefore, this is what Squash means. Combining 'n' different commits into one single commit is called squashing. In this blog post, we will go through the commands that can squash commits.  Advantages of Squashing commits No more redundant commits In a pull request, one may have 'n' different commits for one change. They might have bee...

As part of my work experiments, this week I would like to write down the things that one needs to know in confluence that can up-skill their documentation works. I will cover the following 5 things, How to Anchor link a title? How to Anchor link to a section? How to create a dashing dashboard? Panel - Confluence Macro Layouts - Confluence Tools Content by Label - Confluence Macro 1. How to Anchor link a title? This is the most required thing. Most useful when one has to refer to a section internally on the same confluence page. Let's consider you have a page with three different sections and titles as shown below, In this, if you want to add an internal anchor from a text in paragraph 3 to a title in paragraph 1, you can add it as follows, Choose the word that needs Anchor Click on the link icon from the Toolbar above In the link box, enter #Page Title 1 Click Insert That is it. Your anchor from the selected text to Page Title 1 is ready. This can be tested out in the preview itsel...

Hello readers. So back with another easy yet unexplored feature of npm/yarn packages. We as frontend developers / SDK developers, have to deal with more than one repositories where we actually code contribute. Most SDK developers would know this already or they use the not-so-well documented 'npm link' command . /**  *  @disclaimer  * Please read this post fully before executing any command. My scenario might not be the same as yours.  * This article below uses a repo from my current workplace as an example which is open-source and does not violate the Cisco Confidentiality Policies */ To make this article easier to understand, some representations, Host - Package that needs another local package as part of its node modules. Let's assume the path to this package is  ~/Documents/Repos/demo-app Adhoc - Local package that is added into another package as a dependency. Let's assume the path to this package is  ~/Documents/Repos/semver-monorepo What is...