Recently I was working on a NodeJS project in Azure. I needed one Azure function to queue messages that another Azure function would be triggered by. Conveniently enough, Azure provides the triggering mechanism out of the box (through the concept of function binding). I was using Storage Queues to hold my messages. These are especially handy when the function being triggered happens to fail or crash and you want to avoid data loss. ... Read more

A recent thought that hit me while having a conversation with a family member is that GUIs are confusing for the average user. For example, this family member was viewing a food recipe via Facebook on mobile and she wanted to share it to her desktop workstation which was hard wired to a printer. At least on iOS, this requires tapping the "3 dots" icon and "opening in Safari". I tapped on the "3 dots" and the family member asked me how I knew what that icon meant. ... Read more

Hey, you! You look like you want to run a wiki on your Raspberry Pi. And if you know anything about me, I LOVE wikis. So grab that Pi that’s sitting around and let’s do this! ... Read more

How do you take notes? How do you organize all the information you want to remember? If you’re anything like me, you’ve tried 100 different solutions. Evernote, OneNote, wikis, physical notebooks. You name it. Although I don’t think I’ve yet come to my ideal solution, my latest project gets me close. TLDR: I made a Docker image that auto installs Dokuwiki and backs itself up every hour. Source: https://github.com/ericbarch/dockuwiki An Ideal SolutionBefore trying to build a solution that fit my needs, I first wanted to lay out exactly what I needed from a note taking solution. Here was my (not so) short list of things I wanted: ... Read more

So you’ve got a service internal to your network (or maybe even listening on localhost!) and you want to expose it on the public net, huh? Oh sure, you could open a port on your router. You could use something like localtunnel or Pagekite. But what fun is that? Instead, I’m going to show you how to roll your own solution using just a few npm modules. That being said, I did take quite a bit of inspiration from the localtunnel project, so major kudos to the devs. ... Read more