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 catch Errors by type in the same way you can with Exceptions in Java or C# so it’s quite common for all Errors thrown in a project to be instances of Error.

Some vendors have implemented a conditional catch clause but it’s not a standard and not widely supported in browsers. …

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 to it.

e.g. --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=~/.chrome-disable-web-security

On my Mac, I have the following in my .bash_profile so I can just type chrome at the command prompt so I can quickly start an instance of Chrome with web security disabled for development.

alias chrome=”/Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome --disable-web-security --user-data-dir=~/.chrome-disable-web-security”

This saves me from having to remember the flags needed and allows me to easily test things in Chrome, although it doesn’t work in *every* case as some servers also require header re-writing (keep reading for more on this). …

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 is able to build different Docker images from different GitHub branches.

While it’s quite straightforward to setup and run a private registry, using Docker Hub is very cheap and provides automated image building, starting at only $7 a month for 5 private repositories.

This makes using DockerHub much more cost effective option than spending time setting up and maintaining your own pipeline for building images, which can easily end up costing that much in compute time and cloud storage alone. …

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 (and and without a database!).

Find detailed documentation and a working example at next-auth.js.org

Original Article

This week I released NextAuth, a module specifically designed for Next.js and React, that supports email sign in and oAuth.

It comes with example configuration for Facebook, Google+, Twitter and email sign in and uses Mongo DB to store accounts, but it is easy to extend to work with other providers and other databases. …

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 or when debugging problems.

Executing Containers on all nodes in a cluster is easy, and the docker stats command lets you easily view the memory, CPU, network and IO usage of all Containers on an individual node.

However, unless you are running the Enterprise Edition or something like the Portainer management UI, there is easy way to see the status of all containers at once — and there is no built-in docker command for running commands directly on nodes. …

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 are going — including challenges and the sort of feedback we have had so far.

We launched with support for computer assisted transcription of videos in English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, French, Spanish and Portuguese and within a couple of weeks had added transcript translation (without audio translation yet) and exporting to close caption (VTT) and improved the transcription editor. …

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 background on how to interact with Docker and for debugging when things go wrong. The original documentation has been updated to reflect where you can go ahead and skip sections as Docker Community Edition does the initial setup and configuration for you.

Docker lets you deploy your code inside a virtual machine, so when it’s deployed it will have all the dependancies your software needs — whether that’s a specific version of PHP, Java, Node.js, etc. …

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. If you haven’t read the original pitch, the tl;dr description is “an editor that helps you write articles”.

It helps by using Structured Data, to suggest connections and additional information you might want to include your article, and analytics, to suggest how you might want to improve your writing to better serve your audience (What questions are they asking? What don’t they know?).

What about The Hemingway Editor?

The Hemingway Editor is something you should definitely check it out; frankly I love to include everything that’s in it too — but the focus in Articulate will be primarily on using data to help write articles that people want to read.