How and why to use custom error types in JavaScript — Handling errors well can be tricky. How Error() historically worked in JavaScript hasn’t made this easier, but using the Error class introduced in ES6 can be helpful Throwing errors in JavaScript JavaScript supports try/catch/finally but the Error object it uses works differently from Exceptions in other languages and it doesn’t provide a way to…

Do claims of bias in BBC Question Time panel have merit? — Update: This analysis was referenced in The Economist. The BBC has been fighting back against accusations of bias in the selection of political guests. Such accusations are not new, but do they have merit? In an attempt to defend the impartiality of the show the BBC Press Team recently published…

Working around Cross Origin restrictions during development — Making requests to HTTPS APIs from HTTP sites running on localhost can be a pain, especially as browsers keep changing how they expose the option. Browser Settings The only way to turn off Cross Origin Restrictions in Chrome is to turn off the feature completely when starting the browser by passing arguments…

From GitHub to Docker Hub to Docker Swarm — Configuring automated deployment of an image to Docker Hub every time a change is pushed to a specific GitHub branch (or when a new release is tagged) is easy to do with Docker Hub user interface. Docker Hub will automatically configure your GitHub repository to trigger this for you and…

Authentication for Next.js — Update June 2020 The next generation version NextAuth.js was released in June 2020! It is built for Next.js and Serverless, with simple configuration, out of the box support for a large number of authentication services and supports MySQL, Postgres, MSSQL and MongoDB — or can be used without needing a database! Find detailed…

Docker Swarm is a great way to deploy Docker Containers on AWS or Azure, both of which are supported cloud providers for Docker Community Edition (CE) and Enterprise Edition (EE). A common admin task can be needing to run a command on all nodes on a cluster, either for monitoring…

A web based tool for video and audio transcription, translation, captioning and video creation. — Less than a month ago we released the first public version of our automated video transcription and translation tool Mercury, supported by prototype funding from the Google Digital News Initiative. We now have hundreds of registered users and hundreds of videos uploaded. This is a progress update on how things…

A guide to using Docker for the first time. — This guide was origionally written as internal documentation, before Docker Community Edition for Windows and Mac was published. Docker Community Edition is the easiest and most robust way to run Docker on Windows or Mac, as it does most of the setup work for you. This guide is useful for…

Update: We are looking at rolling the exploratory work we’ve done on this into another project we are working on with a larger team! We recently picked a “Smart Editor” as as one of the project we’d like to work on. …