Programming By Stealth

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes us through some review in order to prepare us to begin our journey into test driven development (TDD) with the tool Jest which he's chosen for our TDD. He clears up some confusion on the difference between `npm install` and `npm ci`, and then he gives us more guidance on when to use which JSDoc tags, especially when documenting pl...

In this final Programming By Stealth and final Chit Chat Across the Pond for 2021, Bart teaches us how to manage our documentation in JSDoc. As any good programmer, he insists on automating as much as he possibly can. He starts by showing us each step that we have to do at the command line, and methodically puts together a JSDoc configuration file that runs scripts and helps create documentation d...

In our last installment, Bart explained why good documentation matters to ourselves and to other developers who want to use our code, and he also explained that using an automatic document generator like JSDoc could help make it easier for us to write good documentation and to keep it up to date more easily. In this week's installment, he starts to show us how to actually write JSDoc comments in l...

As we embark on our journey to create a JavaScript module for the strong, memorable password generating service XKPASSWD, Bart explains the importance of creating good documentation. That sounds super annoying and tedious, and it is, so Bart explains why a good documentation generator will be our friend. He outlines the two distinctly different users of our documentation: those of us who will be h...

Bart Busschots had a vision that certain things we would learn in Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth would be taught by guest lecturers. I thought he was bananas that this would work, but Helma Van der Linden, also known as Helma from the Netherlands stepped up to teach us about coding linters, and specifically ESLint. In this installment she explains what linters are, and why they're useful. Even...

This installment of Programming By Stealth could probably have been two segments but all of us are itching to get moving quickly so we decided to power through. In the first part of the installment, Bart introduces us to JavaScript modules by giving us a bit of a history lesson on how they've evolved. If you're brand new to modules, this will be interesting but not essential. If you have history w...

As we launch full steam into Phase 2 of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots introduces us to the Node Package Manager and Node itself. Unlike our mini-series within a series for Git and Chezmoi, Bart isn't going to do an exhaustive walk through NPM and Node. Instead he's going to teach use what we need as we go along. In order for that to make any sense at all, in this installment, he explain t...

At episode 700! of Chit Chat Across the Pond we take Programming By Stealth into what Bart is calling Phase 2. We've learned a great deal about the client side of programming and we're now going to move to the server side of the web. As Bart described Phase 2, I realized that it's as though we've finished out undergraduate work in computer science, and we're entering graduate school. That observat...

In this final episode of Programming By Stealth before we launch into the back end of web development with PHP, Bart finishes his miniseries on Chezmoi to manage dot files. In this installment he teaches us how to effectively manage our dot files on multiple computers using templating to ensure that the correct settings end up on every computer. You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at p...

Bart has been really excited to teach this next installment of Programming By Stealth where we really dig into learning about Chezmoi templates, including learning functions and arguments, how to declare variables, looping over arrays, and learning the `sprig` utility functions to extend Chezmoi. I thought he was going to jump out of his chair he was so happy to teach pipelines which are a grand w...

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots continues his instruction on how to use the open source tool Chezmoi to manage our dot files, those hidden configuration files on our Macs. In this installment, Bart teaches us how nearly effortless it is to sync our Chezmoi-managed dot files up to a private repo on GitHub. Seriously, it's like 2 steps. Bart then teaches us how Chezm...

In our previous installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart introduced us to Chezmoi, an open source tool to help us manage dot files, those hidden configuration files that get created on our Macs. Configuration files contain information about how we like our Macs configured, including where to access our ssh keys and our preferred command line editor and more. If we move between computers it woul...

As we've become nerdier while learning from Bart, we had started to add hidden configuration files to our Macs and PCs. On the Mac, these configuration files hidden by default by putting a dot in front of them, and hence they are called dot files. Maybe you've stored your ssh keys, or in our Git series you created a user-level gitconfig file, or perhaps you've installed VS Code or Sourcetree which...

A few weeks ago I told Bart off the air that when he was done with his mini-series within a series all about the version control system Git, I'd like a few minutes with him offline so he could explain how to ignore files in Git. I knew there was a way to do it but he hadn't covered it so I assumed it was just something quick he could explain to me. His reaction surprised me, he said, "D'oh!" becau...

As promised, Bart takes us through the final step in our GitHub journey - learning how to contribute to an open source project. He explains three open source scenarios: using someone's code exactly as-is, using their code with a few customizations of your own, and finally the most interesting scenario, customizing the code and contributing your customizations back to the project. When he gets to t...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots teaches us how to use a free service of GitHub called GitHub Pages. This service literally gives you free web hosting for the web apps we've learned to make in Programming By Stealth. Bart starts by explaining to us the difference between static and dynamic webpages, and web pages created by static site generators like Jekyll which gene...

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how to use GitHub as a public repository for our code, or for anything we write for that matter. He reviews whey he chose Github, and then we dig right in. He does explain the benefits of using SSH to access Github instead of HTTPS, and if you haven't set up SSH keys before or you're rusty on the topic, he includes links to our...

In previous installments of our Git miniseries within a series in Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us how to work in Git standalone on one computer, then how to work as one developer with multiple computers. In those installments he taught us the necessary commands and their importance in the Git scheme of things. In this installment he talks about how and where to work with a team in Git. We l...

When Bart started this mini-series within a series on using Git for version control, he explained that our journey would be in three Phases. Phase 1 was the section where we learned about local repositories, and Phase two was dedicated to learning how to have multiple repositories just for ourselves. In this lesson, we finish up Phase 2 by learning how to push and pull changes from our imaginary d...

We continue on our journey to learn how to use Git to do version control as a single person, but this time with multiple devices. As Bart says during this episode, "Who is learning to program here who doesn't have multiple computers?" We've learned how to push our changes to a single separate repo, but we had to always say what branch we wanted to push to what branch on the origin. In this install...

Last time on Programming By Stealth, Bart introduced the concept of remote repositories, also known as remotes. It was one of those episodes where we learned a lot but didn't get to apply what we learned. In this week's installment we get our hands digitally dirty as we create a _bare repository_ (a repo with no working tree), and declare it to be a backup of our local repo. We learn how to fetch...

In this next installment in our mini-series on learning Git, Bart Busschots gives us some foundational knowledge on how to work beyond being one person with one Git repository. He starts by reinforcing what he's explained before, that Git is a peer-to-peer technology, which is hard to wrap your head around if you're used to client-server relationships. He walks us through three scenarios to explai...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart teaches us how Git can help us when we forget to switch to the correct branch before starting to make changes to our code. We're only human, and we will forget, and Git's `stash` command allows us to set our changes aside, switch to or even create and switch to the correct branch and then apply our changes. His explanations and repetition in the...

In this installment of Programming By Stealth Bart teaches us how to deal with conflicts in branches of our code. He has been purposely only changing one thing at a time before now, but it's time to face the reality of when two branches change the same line in the same file. I've been terrified of this topic for a long time, but Bart shows us how easy it is to see exactly what the conflict is, how...

We continue our mini-series within a series learning the version control system Git. We learn two methods to enhance our branching strategy. First, we'll walk through some basic principles on how to number our released versions of our code. From there we'll explore three types of changes that would cause a change in our release version: fixes, new features, and breaking changes. Each of these type...