TIL is my collection of short, technical daily learnings. 251 and counting.
This week a colleague taught me about Simplified Technical English in the context of agentic software development. I’m fascinated by technical writing techniques, so I intend to explore this. To start, I took ten instruction-like sentences from this blog, and asked ChatGPT to convert them to STE. ...
A while ago, I wrote that you can use .toString() to reflect about user-defined functions in the JavaScript runtime. There’s a catch— this value can be set, making it not a reliable way to reflect the function. ...
Node has a key process.versions that can tell us a lot about itself. Here’s one its many keys, telling me the V8 version of my Node with the -p / --print flag: node --print process.versions.v8 14.6.202.34-node.28 See node --print process for more.
In JavaScript reflection with .toString(), comments are preserved. const hello = () => { // returns "Hello" return 'Hello'; }; hello.toString(); // '() => {\r // returns "Hello"\r return "Hello";\r}' Note the comment in the returned string.
Git hooks are scripts that run at key moments in the version-control lifecycle. And, they’re just scripts! So we can call them when we want. <shell> <hook> For me in this project (Zsh + Husky), this could look like: zsh .husky/pre-commit This runs my pre-commit script anytime.
When developing a local Node module, we might want to point another project’s package.json at the local module. Here’s how you do that. ...
Today I learned what tsc --watch is really for. You put it into your package.json as a script. // package.json { "scripts": { "watch": "tsc --watch" } } ...
I’ve written about lpr before; to me the ability to send a file to my printer from the command line is a magic trick. What if I want to know where the file is going to go before sending it? lpr’s docs say: The LPDEST and PRINTER environment variables are consulted first. If neither are set, the current default set using the lpoptions(1) command is used, followed by the default set using the lpadmin(8) command. ...
Today I built a system to read a markdown file from one location in my Hugo project into another. ...
npm init is a nice tool for initializing a package.json. Today I learned that you should not use it on an existing JavaScript project! ...