DEV Community: aclarembeau

Introducing ESTSSH, the configurationless static website generator

aclarembeau — Fri, 14 Jul 2023 20:22:39 +0000

Hey fellow developers,

I wanted to share an exciting new tool I recently built. It's called ESTSSG (EJs, SAAS, Tailwind Static Site Generator). If you're tired of dealing with complex configurations and just want a simple way to generate static websites, then ESTSSG might be the perfect solution for you.

ESTSSG takes a refreshing approach by eliminating the need for extensive setup or configuration files. With just a single command, "npx estssg," you can start generating static websites with ease. It's a game-changer for developers who prefer a more straightforward workflow.

With ESTSSG, you can structure your website files in the src/ directory, placing your EJS templates, SCSS files, and other assets there. The generator then compiles these files and outputs the optimized static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files in the dest/ directory. No complex configuration files or boilerplate code required – just pure simplicity.

One of the standout features of ESTSSG is its built-in local development server. When you run the command, it not only generates your static website but also starts a local server for previewing your changes. And here's the cherry on top – it supports live reloading! Any modifications you make to your source files trigger an automatic refresh in the browser. Talk about seamless development!

Using ESTSSG is as easy as pie:

Install Node.js if you haven't already.
Open your terminal and run npx estssg.
Create your website files in the src/ directory.
Watch as ESTSSG compiles your files and generates the static website in the dest/ directory.
Open your browser and visit http://localhost:8080 to view your website.
Make changes to your source files, and ESTSSG will handle the rest – recompiling and refreshing the browser for you.
Once you're satisfied with your website, deploy the contents of the dest/ directory to your web server.

ESTSSG offers a configurationless experience, but that doesn't mean you're limited in customization. You can tweak the EJS templates, SCSS files, and other assets in the src/ directory to match your specific requirements. If you're feeling adventurous, dive into the ESTSSG documentation and source code to explore advanced modifications.

So, if you've been searching for a simple, configurationless static website generator, ESTSSG is here to save the day. Give it a try and experience the joy of effortless static website development. Say goodbye to complex configurations and hello to productivity!

If you have any questions or would like to share any feedback, tell me. I'm all ears

Cheers,
Alexis

Lancerkit - The web app for freelancers

aclarembeau — Mon, 13 Feb 2023 05:02:55 +0000

Hello, developers!

I've been working on a tool for my own business for the last few weeks. It is now ready to be shared with the rest of the world. So I'm delighted to announce the release of Lancerkit, a full program created exclusively for freelancers.

I'm putting this post on dev.to since many software engineers, like myself, are freelancers.
So, I'd want to hear from the community on any part of Lancerkit, from its technical implementation to its user interface.
I'd want to make Lancerkit the best it can be for freelancers like you, so please share your views and recommendations with me.

As a freelancer, I've seen the difficulties that come with running a business, from acquiring new clients to keeping track of your revenue and costs.

But, as a developer, I've always resisted all of the paperwork and administrative weight that comes with it.
That's why I created Lancerkit: to make my freelancing life easier and more organized. I was able to manage all parts of your freelancing company in one spot using Lancerkit. That's why I believe it's now ready for everyone.

Lancerkit has a variety of features that make it ideal for freelancers. With a few clicks, you can manage your documents, contacts, and invoice your clients. Lancerkit also has a comprehensive financial monitoring system that allows you to keep track of your income, spending, and match transactions.

Today, I'd want to seek your input on that tool. Today, it's something I use daily, but I'd like to obtain your opinion. Is this something you'd consider using, and what do you think of the tool? Is it well-executed?

Simply sign up for a free account on our website to experience Lancerkit for yourself (here is the link: https://lancerkit.com ). I'm sure you'll like it as much as I do!
I'm interested to hear what you think about Lancerkit and how it can help you take your freelancing career to the next level. Thank you for your help!

A website to do API calls from CSV / Excel sheet

aclarembeau — Sun, 13 Nov 2022 05:19:16 +0000

Hey there,

I want to share my MVP with you and get early feedback about my tool. Would you have a few minutes for me?

The concept is the following: As a developer, working for many startups, I've been asked many times to import tabular data, from excel sheets, CSV files, and JSON, ... into APIs. Most of the time, I'm able to do it using code, but I would have loved to have a tool to do that. And, I'm pretty sure many people also shared the same need.

My main questions are

Does it ring a bell to you? Is this something that you already had to achieve?
If yes, would you have paid for a tool to achieve that when you needed it?

I've drafted something: http://sheet2api.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/
It's still very draft, doesn't use HTTPs, is hosted on a tiny EC2 machine that reboots often, so, don't consider it's reliable yet. But, do you think it's worth extending it and making it a real product?

Thanks a lot :)

Show devs: Cronit - The online cronjobs service

aclarembeau — Sun, 07 Aug 2022 04:41:25 +0000

Hi everyone,

Today I decided to share one of the latest tools I made, to help the developer community. It's called Cronit (https://cronit.app): a code execution scheduling system, directly from your browser.

How does it work?

The principle is simple: thanks to Cronit, you can create recurring jobs and schedule them very easily, directly from a web application accessible from your web browser.

Just define a schedule, and an HTTP endpoint to call recurrently, and the application takes care of everything.

Why Cronit?

For the record, Cronit was born from a simple observation: during my career as a developer, I frequently had to set up and configure recurring scripts. To do so, I had to use different tools, such as cron. Each time, I also had to waste a lot of time setting up and installing servers whose only purpose was to run these cron tasks. Realizing how much time this was wasting, I decided to abstract this step by creating the first fully serverless online cronjobs system.

Statiz - Finally a simple static website generator

aclarembeau — Sun, 12 Jun 2022 06:35:40 +0000

Hello to all,

Have you ever had to build a static website? Usually, you can do this with a few HTML files, a little CSS. However, this can quickly become repetitive: your HTML files multiply, and differ only by a few lines of code, your CSS grows, and contains many repetitions, which makes your project difficult to maintain.

There are solutions to fight against this, which are static website generators. However, I found that most of them are usually quite complex to use and limit you in the structure and design of your website. Do you agree with me?

That's why I decided to create Statiz: https://github.com/aclarembeau/statiz, an easy to use website generator that doesn't require any special learning. It works with two commands, nothing more:

statiz build 
statiz serve

And it doesn't require any configuration. Thanks to a module system, it will allow you to add automatically to your project:

SCSS file compilation, to make your styling less repetitive
EJS templates, to unify your HTML

All this with a local server with hot-reload.

In order to make everyone benefit from it, I put it online for free on Github. Don't hesitate to send me your comments, or to use it for your projects ;)

Integrating with webhooks, why and how?

aclarembeau — Tue, 07 Jun 2022 10:17:46 +0000

If you've been working with enterprise software integration projects lately, you've probably heard of webhooks. But what are webhooks, what are they for, and how can I use them in my project? In this article, we will explain everything: what is a webhook and how to configure it so that it can help you integrate different applications?

What is a webhook

Before we start, let's start with a quick definition.
According to Wikipedia, a webhook is:

a method of augmenting or altering the behavior of a web page or web application with custom callbacks. These callbacks may be maintained, modified, and managed by third-party users and developers who may not necessarily be affiliated with the originating website or application

This may sound vague. But in broad terms, it is a signal, sent by one application to another application, to indicate that something has happened.

Let's take the example of an application allowing to receive emails. This one can emit webhooks (signals) to indicate to another application some events (a mail has been written, received, archived, ...)

What is the purpose of this

The main interest of webhooks is to allow you to create applications that will be "reactive", by having the possibility to respond to an event. Unlike other techniques, such as "polling", which requires frequent queries to a third-party application, in the case of webhooks, it is the application that performs the action that informs you of what has happened, allowing you to react immediately.

How to configure them

In general, this is where things get tricky. If you want to create an integration that interfaces with an application that uses webhooks, you will probably hear about elements such as an "endpoint", a "JSON payload", ...

This is exactly what you will need to configure. Remember, a webhook is a signal, sent by an application to another application. If you want to configure a webhook, you have to signal it:

to which web address the application should send a message (this is called the "endpoint")
what precise message should be sent to the third-party application (this is called the "payload", often encoded in a format called JSON)

What to put as an endpoint

The practical choice of the endpoint will depend on your use case, and what you want to achieve by integrating the webhook. You will generally have two choices:

Either, you link two applications together, and, agreeing on a format for your webhooks, choose to add a URL belonging to the second application as the destination "endpoint" for the webhooks of the first application
Or, you decide to create code yourself to react to a webhook. In this case, you will need to set up a web server that can read the different webhooks sent, and process their content.

It just so happens that this second point is where we come in. With jotcode, we offer you a simple solution to quickly create scripts that allow you, among many other things, to process webhook payloads, and perform recurring tasks, set up web servers, ... and all this, directly from your web browser.

Do you want to discover us? Learn more at https://jotcode.io

What is serverless computing?

aclarembeau — Mon, 06 Jun 2022 14:44:41 +0000

A trend has emerged in recent years: serverless computing. But what is it all about? In this article, we will try to tell you about this new computing model? What is it and how could it be useful for your next project?

Some definitions

Before we start, let's try to briefly describe what the serverless computing model is? It's a development model that allows developers to create applications without having to worry about configuring their servers.

How it works

There are several ways to achieve serverless computing. Most proposals typically rely on the use of Docker containers provided by a third-party service provider. You provide them with your code, and the service provider takes care of everything: deploying to these containers, bringing them online, scaling, replicating, rebooting, monitoring, ...

What are the use cases of serverless services

The serverless services offering is generally quite broad and differs depending on how your code is hosted and deployed, as well as the use case. There are serverless services for just about any use case.

Some providers, such as Amazon or Microsoft offer general-purpose services, capable of hosting any type of code, with access to a fairly large number of parameters. Other providers, like us for example offer dedicated solutions adapted to certain types of applications (scripts in our case).

What are the advantages of serverless

Seeing the numerous use cases of serverless, it is interesting to wonder about its usefulness in your project.

The main goal of serverless is indeed to reduce strongly, if not totally, the workload related to the administration of your servers. This will save you time, increase your ability to scale and increase your security capabilities because you won't have to worry about infrastructure anymore.

What are the disadvantages of serverless

Of course, these advantages also come with disadvantages. Indeed, the gain in simplicity can sometimes lead to configuration difficulties in particular use cases. If you have advanced needs and need to control your infrastructure, the serverless model could cause you some problems.

Other compute models

In addition to the serverless model, there are also many other ways to host your code that will allow you to accomplish your goals.

This article mainly covers the differences between the possibilities offered by serverless (or function as a service, also called FAAS), compared to more traditional execution modes, such as on-premise, or the use of virtual machines in the cloud (also called infrastructure as a service or IAAS).

There are other models, such as platform as a service, or PAAS, which offers a hybrid solution, providing you with a semi-managed infrastructure, to provide you with a ready-to-use platform, or the popular no-code model, which can be useful for more limited needs.

Conclusion

Through this article, we have tried to offer you a simple description of the serverless model, what it is and what it could bring to your next project while comparing it with other code execution models.

As a serverless service provider, we at Jotcode believe that the serverless model has its place in many projects, and is particularly useful for scripting, where ultimately, the execution environment matters little. If you want to know more about our products and services, learn more at https://jotcode.io.

Why you should consider JavaScript as a general scripting language?

aclarembeau — Tue, 31 May 2022 20:51:27 +0000

Although the name may be confusing, JavaScript is not the scripting language of Java. Often considered as a tool to build applications in your web browser, JavaScript is a versatile language offering many possibilities: frontend, backend, and many others… Often neglected for this aspect, we will make you discover why JavaScript can also be considered as a language of choice to design your maintenance and server administration scripts, making it a general purpose scripting language.

Reason #1: Because you already know this language

Unlike other dedicated scripting languages such as Ruby, or Bash, most developers have at least minimal knowledge of JavaScript. In fact, anyone who has dabbled in web programming has already used this language. If you write your maintenance scripts in JavaScript, you will have no trouble sharing them with your colleagues.

Reason #2: Because it runs everywhere

Moreover, it is a language that works on most platforms: personal computers as well as servers, Windows, Mac as well as Linux. With JavaScript, there is no need to write a different version of your code on your workstation.

Reason #3: It is supported by all text editors and IDEs

Even if your main programming language is not JavaScript, most code editors and IDEs offer syntax highlighting and autocompletion of JavaScript code. Adding JavaScript code to the side of your main code will probably not be a problem for you, either in terms of implementation or management.

Reason #4: It’s an efficient language

Although it has often had a bad reputation because of its lack of optimization in some implementations, today’s JavaScript is fast, with top-level concurrency support. If you need to manipulate large amounts of data or make many network calls in parallel, JavaScript will be able to provide you with an efficient and elegant solution, without wasting time, especially thanks to the use of promises.

Reason #5: It’s a popular language

In addition to being known by a large number of users, it is also a popular language with an active community on the web. Thus, you will have much less trouble looking for help on code written in JavaScript, than in a dedicated scripting language for your server.

Reason #6: It has a large ecosystem

Unlike other languages, such as Bash, JavaScript has a fairly large ecosystem of packages and libraries. If you need to perform a particular calculation or processing, it is very likely that someone has done it before you, and you can find a code library online that you can simply add to your script to get the desired result.

Looking for a place to store your scripts? (looking for feedback on a project)

aclarembeau — Sun, 15 May 2022 19:35:53 +0000

Hi Dev.to community👋
I'm currently working on a new project, and want to ask for early feedback. Do you have a few minutes to share your thoughts?

So, working as a dev for a few years now, I've often faced the need to quickly write and deploy scripts to perform a bunch of tasks: data extraction, manipulation, API translation, computation, ... But it's not easy to find a place to host them 🏠

For sure, spinning up a new server is not a big deal (or, sometimes, it can be), but spinning up a server for a single script is sometimes overkill. I know AWS lambda, Azure functions exist, but they are sometimes hard to manage, and tools like Heroku can be expensive 💸💸

That's why I want to build a tool, which I named jotcode (https://jotcode.io), that helps people to quickly write down some scripts and run them immediately, without having to care about the hosting platform 🚀

Of course, it's still under progress but I would like to know:

Is this something you could use?
If yes, what do you think about our beta?

If you are interested in following the progress of jotcode, just follow my profile. I'll keep you posted 😉

no-code deserves testing too

aclarembeau — Wed, 09 Feb 2022 05:37:58 +0000

The no-code trend is growing in recent years. Indeed, computer programming is a costly and risky operation and requires advanced technical skills to achieve the realization of an application or a website.

It is therefore natural that solutions that allow doing without this costly design step are currently valued by many creators who now have a faster technique to give life to their ideas.

However, no-code does not mean bug-free. Indeed, computer problems come from multiple sources, and programming problems are not the only source of trouble that can affect the stability of your product.

In the field of computer programming, it is quite common to perform several batteries of tests to ensure the proper functioning of your application. But for no-code applications, it is generally more complex. Indeed, the tools and techniques developed to guarantee the stability of a computer program generally suppose the existence of a code, to be tested automatically before the setting in production, which does not exist in the world of no-code.

The goal of this article will be to explain, first of all, why you might need to test your no-code application, but also to present you with different tools and techniques that will allow you to realize these tests.

1. Why do I need to test my no-code application?

It’s a simple question, but an important one, and so is the answer: no-code applications, like classical applications, are subject to bugs.

Of course, bugs in no-code applications are not likely to come from problems with your software development (although some people do use small pieces of code even in a no-code application). But that doesn’t mean you won’t have bugs.

First, just as there are bugs in the design of the code, there are bugs in the design of your application via no-code. For example, you can encode the wrong parameters, change or misconfigure a setting that may affect the proper functioning of your application. This can happen at the level of the logic of your application as well as at the level of its interface. In this case, even if your tool is online, it may not be usable.

But that’s not all. Your provider may also have bugs. As a customer of a no-code solution provider, you are at the mercy of the slightest failure or technical problem on their side: infrastructure problem, a problem during an update,…

Seeing all these possible problems, I hope to have convinced you of the need to test your application.

2. How to test your application

At this point, you are probably wondering: ok, but how can I test my no-code application? Even if you understand the necessity of such tests, you have to find a way to perform them.

In the case of a no-code application, there is only one element that you can test: it is the finished product, your software.

To test it, you will not be able to rely on the same techniques as developers, which require access to the code. You will have to rely on so-called “synthetic” testing methods.

The goal of a synthetic test method is to “simulate” the interaction of a user with your application. The simplest version is to check if a page opens without error. The most advanced versions allow to go up to the realization of clicks, keyboard entries, …

By constantly monitoring your application, these so-called “syntactic” tests will allow you to ensure that your application is working properly and to notice any deviation (and therefore, in the long run, to avoid bugs).

Conclusion

Thanks to this article, we hope to have been able to draw your attention to the importance of testing, especially for applications that require little or no code, and where classical testing methods are not available.

About Us

This article has been published originally of the blog of Nodown: https://blog.nodown.io

As a provider of synthetic testing software, Nodown allows you to be aware of possible problems on your website, or your application, even if it is made in Nocode.

Here's why you'd better test your website in production

aclarembeau — Sun, 30 Jan 2022 11:17:41 +0000

Let's start with an observation

I've been working in the IT industry for a few years now, creating and helping to create many applications, and I've noticed something: no matter how good your development is, or how much testing you do, there always comes a time when things go wrong.

When your application goes offline overnight, it's usually pretty simple: you have to find the source of the problem and fix it (which can be a bit of an effort, I admit).

But, when only certain parts of your application go down, that's usually when it gets tough. And I think I've found the reason for this: as developers, we too rarely test our applications after they go live.

But why does this happen?

Indeed, manual testing is usually an extra workload that we often only do once, after our product has been delivered. But when it comes to day-to-day quality assurance, it's often more complicated.

"We too often rely on the shoulders of others (or even our users) to let us know when something goes wrong."

This can be seen in the tools we use to ensure the quality of our software. They are often:

either focused on the development phase (via unit tests)
or on monitoring, from a technical point of view (log analysis, exception raising, ...)

However, what counts for our users is generally quite different: it is the finished product, the functionality of the interface.

Hence the importance of production testing

This is where production testing comes in. Often neglected, this is a practice I want to encourage in this post: if you know how to do it, create synthetic tests, simulate the interaction of your users with your different features, and run them periodically: you will see much faster when something goes wrong.

These tests don't have to be very numerous and don't take much time to develop, but they can be vitally important.

You don't even need to have advanced skills in testing frameworks and tools. There are many applications, SAAS or otherwise, that will allow you to add these tests, which will guarantee much better stability to your applications.

A small promotional note

Based on this observation, I decided to add my own contribution by creating my own website monitoring tool. It's called Nodown (I let you understand the etymology of the name), and its purpose is precisely to create this kind of test. Of course, you can also do it by yourself with scripts or other SAAS software, but if you want to try it, you are welcome (just go to https://nodown.io) ;)

Sharing my online event countdown maker

aclarembeau — Thu, 02 Sep 2021 20:37:16 +0000

Today, I'm sharing with you a free tool to build public-facing online countdowns for your event.

It's available here: https://datelist.io/tools/countdown
It's free to use, and, it will stay forever.

So, feel free to use it as much as you want :)