You don't Google hard enough

Peter Phan — Fri, 30 Apr 2021 13:18:41 +0000

TLDR: You don't Google hard enough is from my point of view as a software engineer after using Internet for ten years. I want to share my opinion and experience when searching with Google and tell you why we need to have Googling as a must-have soft skill in today's world.

This post does not endorse Google, I’m not a Google fanboy. However, in the search engine world, Google is the most popular and probably the best one (except for privacy). I will use Google term a lot as most of us are familiar with it.

Ok let's go back to the time before search engine become a thing, where people had to remember the exact website URLs to get access.

Back then, if people want to read news on Yahoo, they must go to news.yahoo.com. People have to pull out the exact link from their heads, which's somehow cumbersome if they have quite a bunch of their favorite websites. Luckily, Google and her friendly neighbors like Bing, DuckDuckGo have come to the rescue.

My online help desk

I rarely used any search engine for looking around in the first couple of years having Internet. I listened to music on nhaccuatui.com, watched videos on YouTube, played games on y8, etc. Things have changed when I got into university to study Computer Science.

Since then, Google is like my secondary teacher. She always comes to help whenever I had problems with my homework. Gradually, Google has become my first choice of asking questions. Anything I don't know, I google it, software bug, cooking recipe, funny cat videos, trending tech, anything, literally.

Keyword is the key

At first, I struggled with Google to get exactly what I want or what error I am dealing with. "Practice make perfect" we say, time after time, I can get a good grasp of googling properly. There are times my friends and co-workers can't find solution for their problems and then I come to them confidently with an answer just because I know how to put correct keyword in a search phrase.

People ask me things I don't know

Of course I'm not a superhero who knows everything about tech, but people around me (family and friends) tend to ask me a lot. I tell them "Hold on, gimme a sec", and get back to them with the answer, thanks to the power I have within my phone. Simple as that.

Conclusion

Even a kid knows how to Google, the point is we should put Google first in mind when searching for things or learning new stuffs. In a workplace, just don't bother your colleagues with your question until you find an answer on Google. There are tips on the Internet that could help you search efficiently and make your daily life less painful.

I'm pretty sure most of the time you can't get what you want just because you don't Google hard enough.

How to setup TypeScript for NodeJS project

Peter Phan — Thu, 16 Jul 2020 07:16:32 +0000

This post was originated on my personal site: https://peterhub.dev

In this short tutorial, we'll go through the process of creating a basic Node+TypeScript application. It's really easy!

Prerequisites

You should know about Node + npm and have them installed on your machine
You have your favorite IDE ready

TypeScript

TypeScript is a language for application-scale JavaScript. TypeScript adds optional types to JavaScript that support tools for large-scale JavaScript applications for any browser, for any host, on any OS. TypeScript compiles to readable, standards-based JavaScript.

This means TypeScript is much better suited for creating long-lasting software and having the compiler help catch bugs and validate types is extremely helpful.

Setup

mkdir typescript-node-example
cd typescript-node-example
npm init -y
npm install --save-dev typescript @types/node ts-node nodemon tsconfig-paths

The first three lines of command are easy to understand, let's see what we've got from line #4.

typescript: Of course we need to install TypeScript. After installing, we have access to the command line TypeScript compiler through the tsc command
@types/node: This package contains type definitions for Node.js. It provides type safety and auto-completion on the Node apis like file, path, process, etc.
ts-node: It allows the app for running TypeScript code directly without being compiled.
nodemon: This will watch for code changes and restart automatically when a file is changed.
tsconfig-paths: We use this to load modules whose location is specified in the paths section of tsconfig.json. More detail here

TypeScript Configuration

We start with npx tsc --init, which will generate tsconfig.json file. The default configuration after removing all commented code:

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "strict": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true
  },
}

It won't work yet. We still need to define some properties like outDir, rootDir, baseUrl and paths

outDir: Where TypeScript generates our compiled code. We specify it to be in build/ folder.
rootDir: This is where TypeScript looks for our code, and we'll write our TypeScript there.
baseUrl: Base directory to resolve non-absolute module names. As we don't want relative import path hell like this import {functionA} from "../../../libs/fileA"
paths: A series of entries which re-map imports to lookup locations relative to the baseUrl we define above

After that, we have the final version of tsconfig.json

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "target": "es5",
    "module": "commonjs",
    "strict": true,
    "esModuleInterop": true,
    "skipLibCheck": true,
    "forceConsistentCasingInFileNames": true,
    "outDir": "build",
    "rootDir": "./",
    "baseUrl": "./",
    "paths": {
      "*": ["*", "build/*"]
    }
  }
}

Setup code reloading script

Create file nodemon.json at the root folder (same level as package.json file)

{
  "watch": ["./"],
  "ext": ".ts,.js",
  "ignore": [],
  "exec": "ts-node -r tsconfig-paths/register ./index.ts"
}

Notice -r tsconfig-paths/register part? We'll discuss it later in the Development section

Development

Let's create index.ts and libs/number.ts.

// index.ts
import { randomNumber } from "libs/number";

console.log("Random number (1 - 100): ", randomNumber());

// libs/number.ts
export function randomNumber(): number {
  // random from 1 to 100
  return Math.floor(Math.random() * 99) + 1;
}

The code is pretty straight forward. For the sake of this short tutorial, let's keep it simple like that 😄. In package.json, add "dev": "nodemon" inside scripts. Now we start the application in development with

npm run dev

Earlier I mentioned about -r tsconfig-paths/register part, it means to help ts-node and node to understand absolute path like import ... from "libs/number"

Build

To compile ts files into js, add this line inside scripts in package.json

"build": "rm -rf ./build && npx tsc"

This script will remove old build before the TypeScript compiler injects new code into it.

Production startup

For executing the app in production environment, we have to run build command first, and then run the compiled JavaScript at build/index.js. Those two tasks can be grouped in a script below:

"start": "npm run build && node -r tsconfig-paths/register build/index.js"

After adding all the necessary scripts, this is the entire package.json file

{
  "name": "typescript-node-example",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "dev": "nodemon",
    "build": "rm -rf ./build && npx tsc",
    "start": "npm run build && node -r tsconfig-paths/register build/index.js"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "devDependencies": {
    "@types/node": "^14.0.22",
    "nodemon": "^2.0.4",
    "ts-node": "^8.10.2",
    "tsconfig-paths": "^3.9.0",
    "typescript": "^3.9.6"
  }
}

Yeah that was it, simpler than you could imagine 😁

DEV Community: Peter Phan