Blog de Joe Freeman

I have a backpack that I love except for the bottom-of-the-bag laptop protection. The laptop slots in some backpacks end before the bottom of the bag. My laptop sits on the bottom of the bag and I just don't trust the padding. Old swag mouse pads make good extra padding. They are often a thick neoprene with material glued to one side. The thicker the neoprene the better the cushion. I just stuff my mouse pad down into the bottom of the backpack with the material side up. That puts the material side of the pad against my laptop when I slide it down into the fold. It doesn't have perfect corner coverage but it has saved me a few times.   Slide the laptop into the folded mousepad. It only protects the laptop if the laptop is wrapped by the mouse pad.   Use a mouse pad at the bottom of the laptop compartment. The laptop slides into the fold Get a better backpack? You can always get a backpack that holds the laptop off the bottom of the bag.  It provides more protection...

Windows and WSL interoperability is fantastic but sometimes you end up with unintended side effects.  When coding I like to have specific tools and configurations for each environment.  Otherwise, I can get pathing or other problems.   Why is it complaining about a '\r' character when I'm running Linux?  It is because some Linux tools and Windows files collide with each other. With that in mind, you may wish to remove the Windows executables from your Linux $PATH.  There are two ways to configure the WSL to not import the Windows $PATH. You can disable or enable it on a per WSL instance basis.  You can globally configure WSL so that the PATHbehavior is the same for all WSL instances you have configured. Configuring individual WSL instances with wsl.conf Each individual WSL instance looks in its own configuration file   /etc/wsl.conf  that may not be created by default in your WSL instance. 1. Edit the existing /etc/wsl.conf .  Creat...

Sometimes you just want to create Model objects around some type of JSON payload of schema definition.  It seems like you either end up building your own tool, doing the conversion manually, or hunting around to find some schema generator.  Sometimes there just isn't a tool that you want to use and sometimes there is. I'm working Dart where we want to create immutable objects from deserialized JSON schema for AdaptiveCards.  I ran across an open-source tool, quicktype.io, that can generate JSON serializable model classes for over 20 different languages. There are several different settings that let do some customization.  You can then consume those classes/functions as is  or tune them to your needs. It is a great learning aid even if you don't use it for your models.  I really like how it lets me compare how different languages handle models and JSON. Disclaimer:  I have no idea who created https://quicktype.io or how it is run.  Pull down...

Flutter is opinionated about using a functional programming model that includes immutable data objects.  I've found that we tend to ignore that whole immutable thing when dealing with JSON data.   Projects can be loose when handling incoming JSON data and how it is accessed, sprinkling string-style map keys across the codebase.  We can reduce that tendency by providing models to eliminate the string keys and mutable models to stop people from directly manipulating maps of strings. Some languages are functional only.  Other languages have no way of generating immutable objects. In those cases, we just end up with objects that can be easily converted into and out of JSON structures and strings. I'm working in Dart right now so the rest of this will be Dart samples Modeling Longitude and Latitude Using the JSON Schema Let's pick something simple as an example.  We're going to use this Latitude and Longitude  JSON Schema  that follows the schema defin...

Creating tests for various size viewports can help us look for wrapping and sizing regressions.  Our goal is to run the same test across several different-sized displays looking for regressions in the individual display sizes. We can do that by sizing the canvas just before loading the widget tree and running the golden test comparison.  We need either the viewport size for the device or the raw size of the device in pixels and its DPR. So currently this test code accepts the raw size and the DPR.  The alternative is to just run the MediaQuery against the device and accept its width and height with a DPR of 1.0.  The test code below supports both. Test Code There are two tests, one for the Pixel 3a and the other for the Pixel 4XL.  Both tests pass in the raw pixel size and the Flutter DPR. The test  Sizes the canvas to the device geometry. Brings up the demo app Creates/validates a golden image snapshot of the viewport The test app is the MediaQuery code li...

We wanted to verify our layout behavior across various screen widths, especially across layout change boundaries. Ex: Change field sizes, expose menus, or make other items at higher widths.  Mobile devices have high-resolution screens that are logically down-scaled for sizing display widgets essentially using a logical resolution. I ended up writing this simple MediaQuery program that tells me the  effective  size of the screen of a device. This lets us build a library of test device resolutions and aspect ratios. We can run the same test across as many devices as we wish because computing is cheaper than manual testers. Flutter golden image tests are a simple way to watch for layout regression.  They compare a stored image against a new image captured during test execution.  The base behavior is that they open an 800x600 canvas and use that.   We can change the size of the test canvas where the golden test images are rendered. What if we want to work ...