DEV Community: Glenn Carremans

Custom mail address

Glenn Carremans — Tue, 28 Apr 2020 13:08:20 +0000

Most devs have 1 or more domains for their own blog/portfolio or some side-projects that never gets finished 😉.
A year ago I asked on DEV what kind of mail solutions people are using for their custom domains.

How to setup a mailbox with custom domains?

Glenn Carremans ・ Apr 17 '19 ・ 1 min read

#discuss #question #advice #help

Most answers that I received where focussed around self-hosted mail solutions.
I did setup a mail-in-a-box instance and learned a lot about mail spam filters and SPF/DKIM/DMARC DNS records.

This time I would like to discuss specifically what 3rd party mail solutions you use and why. For personal use and/or projects.

GSuite
Zoho
Or maybe something else

Let me know in the comments.

I'm Glenn, and I support women devs.

Glenn Carremans — Sat, 07 Mar 2020 17:00:58 +0000

I find it a real shame that women are still treated differently in the tech sector (or in any sector). There have been more than enough women in our history that proved that this masculinity is useless.
I made a blog post about a couple of them last year but there are a lot more that should be mentioned:

Tech created by women

Glenn Carremans ・ Mar 8 '19

#history #womenintech #womenwhocode #iwd

We work in a creative sector where we as developers and designers need to solve lots of problems, technical, UX or others, and by bundeling lots of different people together you can get different solutions that you might not have thought about yourself.

At our office we already had a pretty much all female design team and recently I noticed that we are getting more young female developers. I love this movement and hope to see many more female developers join our different teams.

I will never judge someone based on their gender, race, age, ... In my opinion you can only judge someone on their work and even then you should give feedback and point out what could have been done better. Or you should get to know them first on a more personal level before you make an opinion.

One of my favourite devs is @marinamosti! She is an excellent writer and I especially enjoyed her beginners series about Vue:

Hands-on Vue.js for Beginners (Part 1)

Marina Mosti ・ Jan 28 '19

#javascript #vue #beginners #tutorial

Dracula PRO released! 🧛‍♂️

Glenn Carremans — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 17:27:59 +0000

First I want to start by saying that I am not affiliated with Dracula nor is this a sponsored post, I am just a fanboy 🤓

People that use a dark theme for their dev environment might have already heard about Dracula, it is one of the most used custom dark themes and has support for a wide variety of applications (Jetbrains, iTerm, Slack, ...).

I have been using Dracula for some time now and for every application that it supports. I find this useful to have a similar theme across multiple tools. Also it being open-source is a huge bonus for me.

A couple of weeks ago @zenorocha announced that he was working on a Dracula PRO alternative but didn't share any details about it. I was very excited to see that the creator of Dracula is working on something new.

This week he finally released Dracula PRO! It is a very similar dark theme but for this he did a lot of research in color palettes and used a more mathematical approach to define the colors that he used.
Also instead of only 1 theme he created 6 different variants that are slightly different from each other so that users can decide which one they like more according to their personal taste.

Zeno also handpicked 4 monospaced fonts with ligature support that would work best with the Dracula theme. He released the Dracula Pro theme with support for 10 application and from I heard more will be added in the future.

I know that I will be buying and trying out the new Dracula PRO this weekend!

What do you think about this new theme and would you consider spending money on a theme?

Also if you haven't seen it yet ploi.io is giving away a Dracula Pro license on their Twitter!

Liquid error: internal

Contributing to improve yourself

Glenn Carremans — Tue, 16 Jul 2019 15:41:00 +0000

This piece was originally written for Your First Year in Code by @isaacdlyman . Even though it didn't make it in the book I still wanted to share it with the community and hope that it helps at least a couple of people with some of the tips.

Contributing to improve yourself

The title might seem a little vague because it could mean a lot of things. You could contribute to charity, your local community, ... This will also help improve yourself. But the specific topic I will be sharing here with you is how contributing to open source projects can help improve yourself as a developer. This is something I try to apply myself as much as possible and I can confirm that it has helped me learn new programming languages, environments and tools.

Personal experience

One of the first projects that I contributed to was for an Android library that I used in a personal project. I added Dutch translations to the library, it was only a couple of strings in an XML file so it was very small but still I learned a lot from this contribution.
I just got my bachelor degree and started working as a professional programmer so I didn't have much experience with Git and Github at the time. So with this contribution I learned how to make a fork of a project on Github and how to pull it in locally on my laptop so I could work on it. After committing the changes to my remote project on Github I also learned how to make a Pull Request to the project.
This small contribution was for me the start of many small and some bigger contributions to many projects.

Finding a good project

Interesting projects

Look around on Github (currently the biggest platform for open source projects), go through articles from people sharing their project or maybe look at one of the applications or tools that you use there is a big chance that at least one of them is an open source project that you can contribute too. The most important part of finding a good project to work on is that it also interests you. It is something that you use or something that you think does important work. If you decide to work on something that you might not find useful or interesting there will be a big chance that you will never finish your contribution.

Things to look for

If you have found a project that you want to contribute to here are a couple of tips to look for before diving in.

Active?

I think this is a very important one to look for. Check if the project has been active in the last 3-4 months. It would be a shame that you might have put lots of hours into your contribution and that it will remain an open pull request that never received the glory of being merged.

Open issues

Looking at open issues is also a good indication how active a project is. However having lots of open issues doesn't mean it is a "dead" project it could also indicate that it has an active community so it is also important to look at the dates of issues.
Also looking at open issues is also a good way to find something that you can contribute. Lots of projects also use the label system, this might help find a good beginner friendly issue.

Good guidelines

This is not a requirement but does help a lot to get your contribution approved. Does the project have good guidelines? Do they describe how to send in contributions, do they have coding standards that you need to follow, testing tools that they use and so on. The more info they supply the smaller the chance that your contribution will get denied (if you follow their guidelines).

Install documentation

This might not apply for every type of project but still in many cases this is needed. Is there a well written and up to date installation documentation available? This is extremely helpful if you are setting up a new environment that you have never worked in before.

What to contribute

Especially for newer programmers it might be scary to contribute to a project, even a smaller one. Trust me I have been there. You might think that it will be denied (for whatever reason) or that you might write "bad code" and they will just smash your confidence.
For me this has not been the experience, each community that I contributed to have been very open to contributions and if something wasn't correct they pointed that out and I adjust my code. So don't holdback and dive in!

Doing a contribution doesn't always have to be a new feature there are lots of things you can contribute to a project:

Documentation, lots of projects love these contributions
Bug fixes
Improvements of existing features
Updating packages/libraries
Refactoring older code

Comfort zone

It is easy to work on a project in an environment that you are comfortable with but this is an opportunity to work on something new, something that might require you hours of searching online or asking for help. This is a good thing, here you will learn the most from.

If you work in PHP try working on a Node.js project, if you work in Java why not try a Python or Ruby project, etc. Learning new environments might give you a different perspective about solving a problem. You will learn the benefits compared to a different language. Why some languages work better in specific use-cases.

Besides learning a new language you might work with new tools that are being used by the project. Building tools, testing tools, linting tools, ... maybe even something small like a Github bot that you can use yourself in your next project. There are lots of tools that have a free tier for open source projects.

Tip

Start with something small, like a documentation improvement. This gives you the opportunity to get used to things like Git, Github, the environment (if needed for your contribution) and the reviewing and merging process.

Feedback

After getting your contribution ready and making a pull request on the project there is always the possibility that it won't get accepted and merged right away but it is also not denied. There might be a comment from a maintainer or a community member requesting to change something. You shouldn't see this as a negative comment but take it as positive feedback, learn from it. This could be as simple as a coding style error that you made, a missing space or a variable that they want named differently.

Benefits

Of course the main benefit is learning a new environment, gaining new knowledge and as a developer you should always keep learning and try to break out of your comfort zone.

Other benefits are learning new tools, coding styles and/or code testing. Depending on the type of project there could be a lot of things you can learn from just making 1 small contribution. You gain knowledge and the project gets improved, it is always a win-win.

Other than the knowledge benefits mentioned above there is also the networking benefit. While working on different projects and interacting with different communities you will learn new people, they can give you advice or even become friends. You can connect on social media platforms and reach out in the future to your network if you need help or maybe if you are looking for a new project or a job.

Besides these benefits there is also a long term benefit, you can show what you have worked on. Lots of recruiters or companies look at public Github profiles, this shows them what environments you have worked in and might indicate what interests you have and if you might fit in their team/project.

Conclusion

Contributing to open source is a fun way to learn new things while supporting the projects that you like. For you personally as a developer this will always have short- and longterm benefits.

As a developer it is okay to make mistakes, even senior developers do. By contributing your changes will always be reviewed by at least one person before it gets merged, if not that is the project maintainers fault but that is an other topic.

The only source of knowledge is experience.

-- Albert Einstein

Travis CI added draft pull requests support

Glenn Carremans — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 14:40:43 +0000

About 3 months ago I noticed that Github drafts are not triggering Travis CI builds, not even when the draft flag gets removed.

Comment for #2035

Glennmen commented on Mar 20, 2019

Strange, Travis doesn't get triggered if Draft has been removed.

Update: I made a ticket about it on Travis CI Community: https://travis-ci.community/t/removing-draft-doesnt-trigger-travis/2715

View on GitHub

I made a ticket about this on the Travis forum, the workaround suggested at the time was closing and reopening the PR.

Now today (24/06) Travis CI added support for building draft PR's, not only when they are marked ready for review.

This should improve the quality of the PR's as testing can be done in draft PR's and marked ready for review when all tests pass.

What do you think about this update? Do you use draft PR's or rather add [WIP] in the PR title.

16 Week Streak 🎉 + What online poll tool do you use? 🤔

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 29 May 2019 17:15:57 +0000

16 Week Streak 🎉

Last week I received the 16 Week Streak badge! 🎉 I am very happy to be part of this community, even though most of my blog posts don't have the same audience reach as some of the bigger bloggers here 😉

I have to say that it was hard for me to go for this badge, a couple of times I thought about not writing but then it would be a waste because I was so close already. I am sure that this decreased the quality of my blog posts, so I will now probably make less blog posts but I hope that they will deliver better content.

Thank god @ben confirmed that the 16 week streak will be the final streak badge, he is right that streaks enforce gamification 😅

Adjust badge streak copy for 16 week badge #2467

benhalpern posted on Apr 16, 2019

What type of PR is this? (check all applicable)

[ ] Refactor
[x] Feature
[ ] Bug Fix
[ ] Documentation Update

Description

This makes it clear that the 16 week badge is the final streak badge, to eliminate the possibility to have folks toiling addictively or otherwise introduce negative side affects of gamification.

View on GitHub

What online poll tool do you use? 🤔

I am looking into adding a poll liquid tag here on DEV. I think this will open a lot of new opportunities to different types of blog posts:

Will you watch x live stream?
What do you think about this new plugin/framework?
Are you exited with this new feature?
...

The list of options is endless I think.

I would like to know if you guys make online polls what free poll tools do you use?
So far it seems that we can't use Twitter polls, this was of course my first option.

Maybe some requirements:

It has to be free
Embed, iframe is easiest to implement in liquid tags I think

An other option is to add native poll support in DEV but the downside would be the added complexity for voting. This would (I think) require visitors to have an account to be able to vote.

So what do you guys think? All idea's are welcome.

Please note that this is not yet an approved DEV feature, just something that I am investing and possibly will make a feature suggestion and PR for.

Android custom launcher

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 22 May 2019 17:26:17 +0000

A client that I work for as a consultant/Android developer wants to have a custom Android launcher on their devices.

I know how to make an app that can be installed as a launcher. The technical difficulty that I am researching is having the custom changes but still keep the drag & drop behaviour and possibly also the app widgets that are available in Android.

I also know that it is possible to make this because there are already lots of 3rd party launcher applications available that also have this behaviour.

I did some research and found out that the drag & drop behaviour is very hard to make and I couldn't find any libraries that provide this behaviour. Different sources suggest to use the default launcher from the open source Android project and use that as a base to work on.

So here I am asking for some advice.
Should I try to make it myself or start with the default launcher from Android?
If I use the default Android launcher as a base, is it advised to use the latest version or for example use the Android Nougat version? I don't think there are any Android 8 or 9 features that my client wants and also not sure how backwards compatibly these version are.

Link to default Android launcher

I know this might be a long shot but any DEV community members that might have any experience with this or that might have some contacts in their social groups that could help me out? 😄

Any information or advice is welcome!

What book should I read next? 🤔

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 15 May 2019 17:27:59 +0000

This year I set my reading goal to 5 books, I have already read 2 so far:

I have a whole list of want to read books but instead of choosing one myself I thought it might be fun to let you guys decide what book I should read.

DEV doesn't have polls (yet) so I made one on Twitter, feel free to retweet 😄

Glenn Carremans

@glenncarremans

What book should I read next? 🤔 #goodreads #DEVCommunity

goodreads.com/book/show/2225…

goodreads.com/book/show/2253…

goodreads.com/book/show/9426…

goodreads.com/book/show/2194…

17:15 PM - 15 May 2019

0 0

The options are:

Also looking forward to any other suggestions in the comments!

I would also like to share that I am trying to get Goodreads liquid tags on DEV but for that Goodreads first need to add embeds to their website: Feature request

I think books are an important resource to devs and that adding a Goodreads liquid tag to DEV would make it a lot easier to share among each other.

Feel free to follow me on Twitter @GlennCarremans or Goodreads @Glenn

My Contribution to CDNJS

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 08 May 2019 15:52:17 +0000

🎉 My PR got merged into CDNJS after 7 months! 🎉

First a little bit about CDNJS

CDNJS is a public CDN that hosts most (if not all) of the popular libraries (JavaScript, CSS, ...). Because of this you can very easily include a library in your web application. If you are not familiar with NPM, build or bundle scripts, or if you just want to make a small static website using a public CDN is a good option. You also don't have to host the files yourself which might reduce bandwidth costs.

Another benefit of using CDNJS is that it is using Cloudlfare and because of this a library might be cached on one of their edge servers near you and this results in faster response times that also might increase your website loading speed.

It is also open source and for me that is a big bonus.

Why CDNJS?

There are of course alternatives (not going to talk about paid CDN providers).
A couple well known ones might be Google Hosted Libraries and jQuery CDN, the issue with these are that they only host a very select amount of libraries.

jsDelivr comes close to CDNJS. They also host almost all popular libraries and also use Cloudflare in combination with other CDN providers. This might seem better but because of this they have additional layers to route requests between CDN providers. Here is some information I found about this, however please note that it is written on the CDNJS Github by a CDNJS maintainer (but he is also a jsDelivr contributor).
The post is from 2016 so don't know how correct it still is. Maybe someone can provide more information in the comments.

Also as shown here CDNJS is used more than jsDelivr so that might give an increased cache hit from edge servers which results in faster response times.

My PR

It actually started in December 2017 where I asked on Twitter why CDNJS doesn't have SRI, well it does but not on the search results page. Here Peter Dave challenged me to make a PR for it.

Glenn Carremans

@glenncarremans

@cdnjs @Cloudflare Why doesn't cdnjs have SRI? Is it better to use jsDelivr or maybe even self host static library files?

09:39 AM - 22 Dec 2017

0 0

Peter Dave Hello͌ͯͦ̉

@peterdavehello

@GlennCarremans @cdnjs @Cloudflare It's not enabled on search result yet, pull request would be welcomed 🙂

14:21 PM - 22 Dec 2017

0 0

So fast forward almost one year to October 2018, I found out about Hacktoberfest and wanted to contribute. Perfect project!

I never did anything in Node.js so it took some time to setup the project locally before I could start working on it. Thankfully there is a lot of information online and in the end it wasn't even that difficult.
So I made my PR and I waited, and waited, and ... No hard feelings to Peter Dave, I have been in the same situation. Making time for something can be hard. But finally last week Peter was able to review and test my PR and it got merged!

[Website] Added "Copy Script Tag with SRI" option to library search results #251

Glennmen posted on Oct 06, 2018

I do have experience in JS but this was the first time I worked with a Node.js project. I would perfectly understand if I made any mistakes.

So I have actually "reported" about this almost a year ago on Twitter and @peterdavehello challenged me to make a PR for it. I have never forgotten about it and now because of Hacktoberfest I decided to make some time for it and try it out.

I also saw some open issues about the same issue: Fixes #152 SRI support on search result Fixes cdnjs/cdnjs#12746 Add Copy Script Tag with SRI option

View on GitHub

So now everyone can quickly copy a library link with SRI information directly from search results.

Link to CDNJS

DuckDuckGo !Bang

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 01 May 2019 16:09:00 +0000

First I would like to say that my previous blog post got way more attention than I was expecting, thanks every one for commenting and sharing!

Since about a month I have switched to DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine on my phone and laptop and overall I have been very pleased with it. Of course I am also a fan of the build in dark theme.

Google is currently the biggest search engine, because of their advanced algorithms they seem to always provide the best search results. This has been the case for a very long time but I think (for me) the time is now to switch to an alternative, DuckDuckGo is growing very fast and their search results are improving.
I have tried it in the past but wasn't pleased with the search results so quickly switched back to Google. Since then DuckDuckGo has improved a lot and have also build in more features, for example a build in calculator.

DuckDuckGo has greatly improved over the last couple of years but still there is room for improvement. For me when I search dev related questions or issues I am not always pleased with the results, in this case Google did provide with better results for me.

But still I am not going to run back to Google because of this. I found a very useful feature from DuckDuckGo that not only could help you get better search results but can also increase search speed in general.
Here comes the !Bang, DuckDuckGo !Bang are shortcuts that let you target searches on specific sites. And if DuckDuckGo is you browser default search engine you can use it directly from your address bar.

To use a bang it is actually very easy, for example you can search on DEV with this bang: !devto glennmen

Thanks to all the lovely comments in my previous blog post I was able to make a list here of interesting bangs that I hope can help you.

General searching:

DEV: !devto
Stack Overflow: !so
DevDocs: !dd
Hacker Noon: !hno
Medium: !medium
If you ever want to do a search on Google: !g

Web related:

MDN Web Docs: !mdn
Can I use...: !caniuse
CSS-Tricks: !csst
npm: !npm
cdnjs: !cdnjs

Android:

Android Developers: !android
The Android Arsenal: !andar

PHP:

PHP.net: !php
Packagist: !packagist

Ruby:

RubyDocs: !rubydocs
RubyGems: !gem

This is only small portion of the available bangs, there currently are over 12.000 bangs so check them out. They have shortcuts for all kinds of websites.

For more information about DuckDuckGo bangs and what bangs there are available check out their website.

If there are any useful websites missing you can also submit your own bangs to be included in their list: https://duckduckgo.com/newbang

What are your favourite dev resources?

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 24 Apr 2019 13:30:13 +0000

We as developers are lucky to have tons of resources out there that can help us, maybe even too many. I would like to know what are some of the resources that you use most of the time.

For me I will list here some of the resources that I use, please add yours in the comments.

General searching, any language/framework:

Stack Overflow, I think this is the same for most developers.

Android (I mostly work on native Android applications):

Android Developers, the official docs from Google
Android Arsenal, to search for libraries that I can use

PHP/Laravel (I sometimes work in PHP and most projects are with Laravel):

PHP.net, official documentation for PHP
Laravel, official documentation for the Laravel framework
Laracasts, community forum for Laravel and Laravel related topics

Server related documentation:

DigitalOcean Community, I am a big fan of the tutorials here! I learned a lot from them

With the information gathered from this post I will make a follow up post that I think will speed up (basic) searching on your favourite resources.

How to setup a mailbox with custom domains?

Glenn Carremans — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 14:05:05 +0000

I have a couple of domains for all kinds of different projects, some on shared hosting (with a mailbox solution from the provider) and some on a private VPS.

My goal is to move everything to my VPS but the problem I currently have is that I don't know how to setup a mail server solution. Any advice would help me a lot, do you have your own mail server solution or are you using a 3rd party service?

Maybe some requirements that I currently have:

Supports multiple domains
SMTP so I can send mails from my backend application
Can create multiple mailboxes if needed

I understand that there is not 1 perfect solution but any tips are welcome to help me reach my goal.