Asad Dhamani

2020 has been a real roller-coaster of a year for all of us, and it's taught us a lot about ourselves–when you're sitting at home, you can't escape your thoughts. Sure, there were a lot of bad things, but let's focus and double down on the good. The Good

Recently I was building an API where I had to accept URLs as parameters in Grape routes. I URL-encoded the URL, but either my request would hit the wrong route, or it wouldn't capture anything after the second . in the URL, because it tries to parse that as a format

Recently, I was working on a Chrome extension for a web app where I wanted to share the login state between the extension and the web app. Generally you'd roll with a token-based authentication system or relying on API keys, but neither of those approaches are acceptable if you want

Hello!

I'm working on a project that has an aspect of archiving web pages for posterity. This is to fight the problem of link rot. There's already sites like archive.org and archive.today. But the problem with them is that they save the content as they see it, not as

Deep learning is something that needs a discrete graphics card. Running deep learning programs on a CPU is just too slow, it can take days upon days to run even the most basic deep learning programs on a CPU. Also, CUDA by NVIDIA is what's most often used, so if

I've blogged on Medium in the past, and was at one point even paying them every month for their membership. They have a large network of high quality blogs, all in one place, and they have one of the best writing experiences on the web. But I will not be

iFramely is a service that can be used to extract data from web pages from meta tags, opengraph tags, twitter cards, and to generate oEmbeds when possible. I've put some examples of the same below. iFramely provides this functionality in a subscription service online, which I'd recommend checking out here.

If you've ever used a service like Pocket or Instapaper (Safari and Firefox also provide this, both powered by the now-defunct Readability parser code), you will have used a feature called "Readability" or "Reader View". What is does is that it takes a page, detects what

mkdir -p, wherein you create a directory, including all its parent directories if they don't exist, is functionality that is not provided out of the box by Node, but is required fairly commonly. There's a Node package node-fs-extra that comes to our rescue! To use it: npm install --save node-fs-extra

Sometimes you might want to disable console.log in JavaScript, because, say, you have a library performing excessive logging, or for any other reason. This is how you can do it: console.log = function () {}; In case you want to preserve the console.log functionality under a different function, you can

There's this very interesting system for classifying the category a piece of text belongs to, called IPTC Media Topics. It helps you determine what subject topic a particular document / text piece belongs to. Here's an example of the hierarchy categorization offered by Media Topics: Media Topics is a taxonomy of

With ES6, JavaScript has added some powerful new features, one of them being async/await. What async/await basically does is it lets you write asynchronous code that looks like synchronous code, making it much easier to reason about, and saving you from the callback pyramid of doom and promise

I was recently faced with a challenge where I was building an application in Ruby, and for one specific task that I wanted to accomplish, there were no libraries for it in Ruby, there were only libraries in JavaScript. Obviously I could not rewrite the entire application in JavaScript for

If there is one programming language that you should learn that will cover the highest amount of bases for you, which one should it be? JavaScript, of course! JavaScript is still the only choice you have when building front-end web applications, although WebAssembly is changing that. We have NodeJS, so

Are you trying to run some MySQL based software on a server with low memory (AWS micro, Vultr micro) and keep running out of memory? If you're running this application on a server with very low memory, it's safe to assume you don't have a lot of performance needs at

I recently gave Posthaven a shot for hosting my blog. While ultimately I decided to go with Ghost instead due to the lack of a few features (syntax highlighting, custom URLs, image headers, markdown support), I tried to dirty my hands and hack together a solution that would allow me

I much prefer SSH key authentication to password-based authentication when working with remote servers. One, it's one less password to remember. Two, on your machine, it's automatic. Three, it's more secure. So once you've got your server running, this is how you can copy your SSH key to it: ssh-copy-id