Bash gets a lot of flak from everyone. It’s quirky, has too many ways of doing one thing, and its syntax is atrocious. I belonged to the same camp and avoided bash scripting with a ten-foot pole, but that changed recently. I had to deal with bash in my full-time job, and saw that for all its cons, bash gets the job done faster than anything else. The breeze with which you can combine tools makes it a worthwhile tool for most scripting needs.

I have been working with Salesforce past few weeks for Punchydata—a product that I am developing. It doesn’t take long to realize that it’s not a pleasant API to work with. The documentation is sparse and throughly lacking examples. A good majority of things is only achievable via SOAP and XML. Now with a better understanding of how the API works, I can do the next best thing—blog about it. So, I’ll be writing a few posts on how to do something in Salesforce.

Remember the left-pad fiasco and the ensuing criticism that the node community is lazy to an extent that it’ll avoid writing even a trivial piece of code? There’s a form of it in the frontend world, where libraries are the first choice even when the same thing could be achieved in a few lines of code.

Dark mode is getting wildly popular these days ever since Apple shipped it with Mojave. However, the usefulness of dark mode can be negated by websites that are predominantly white. That’s why Webkit introduced a media query attribute, prefers-color-scheme, to enable developers to apply styles specific to dark mode. As of April 2019, the support for it is still poor, but it’s on the roadmap for both Firefox and Chrome. The support percentage is bound to climb up once both these browsers start supporting it.

Form elements looking different across browsers is a well-known problem, but the <select> element is especially problematic in this regard. If I try to change the default styling of <select> by increasing its height (which, by default, is too small), the dropdown menu starts to look drastically different in all major browsers. Not to mention that it’s plain ugly in Firefox and Safari.

Google Sheets is an incredibly powerful tool. But did you know you can extend its powers by creating your own formulas? Although Google Sheets already comes with multiple functions to do higher-level things (IF..THEN, SWITCH, QUERY), custom formulas can help you do more advanced stuff and can often be simpler and more maintainable solutions.

From a UX perspective, human-readable (or humanized) time is a must-have. “5 hours ago,” instead of “22th Dec, 2018 09:18:18 AM” is so much easier to parse. To render timestamps in that format inside a Jinja template, we can create a filter in the flask application code.

I have been using Jinja for my side-project and was surprised to find that there’s no way to uppercase only the first letter. There is a capitalize filter but it also lowercases the rest of the letters—something you wouldn’t want if your text has acronyms or proper nouns. Jinja doesn’t support sentence case by default, but thankfully it’s not hard to recreate that.

UIKit has become my de-facto standard for any new project. It’s simple, the default look is refreshing, and there are tons of useful components and utility classes. In most cases, it gets the job done without getting in the way. However, coming from the bootstrap world, one thing I dearly missed was the collapsible navbar.

Subresource Integrity (SRI) is a new security feature that safeguards websites against tampering of a script/stylesheet at the source. Say, you want to include a script from a public CDN, but you also protect yourself against potential manipulation of the code after you have included it, SRI is the way to go. The feature gives the developer the ability to add a hash-sum with the script tag. Before the browser loads the resource, it will match the hash-sum of the content with what is specified in the tag. If they are equivalent browser proceeds with execution, otherwise it’s blocked.