A few weeks ago, I had to write a web scraper that processed a long list of similar web pages and pulled data from each website into a single text file. I used CasperJS as the web scraping engine, which is fairly simple to set up. My first approach was to launch a single instance of Casper, then visit each web …
It’s a common misconception among the general public that software engineers sit at their desks all day, pounding out code while drinking coffee. For quite a while, this is what I thought as well. When I took my first introduction to programming class at the University of Washington however, my professor asked the class this question, on the first day: How …
A few weeks ago, my students started learning how to make HTTP requests with JavaScript using AJAX. As a developer with plenty of experience interacting with REST API’s on the Web, I wanted to make it easier for my students to ramp up on AJAX. As a result, I devised a five-step method and for the next few sections, walked them through …
JavaScript may not be the poster child of object-oriented programming languages, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of OO principles in your JS app. Plain Old JavaScript Objects, or POJOs, can be a lifesaver when working with complex datasets and databases. They’re easy to set up, and have many use cases such as normalizing data, handling faulty responses, …
For a few days now, my internet has been intermittently shutting off in the afternoon and turning back on in the evening (thanks Comcast?). I want to see the exact time at which my connection drops, but unfortunately the ping command does not have built-in timestamp support. Fortunately, the Bash script below adds a thin wrapper around ping in order …