Asad Dhamani

Reflecting on 2020 and Plans for 2021

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

Parsing parameters with special characters in Ruby Grape

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

Using default Rails authentication with a Grape API

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

Considering different strategies for archiving web pages

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

How to learn deep learning on the cheap

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,

Why I don't blog on Medium anymore - and you shouldn't either

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

How to use iFramely as a Node library

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

How to detect if a page is an article

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,

mkdir -p and file copying in Node.js

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:

How to disable console.log in JavaScript

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

Media category classifications

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

JavaScript - how to "await" in a callback

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

Using libraries from one language in another language

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

JavaScript - One language to rule them all!

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

web dev

Meteor framework review

Over the last few years, I've worked extensively with the Meteor web framework. After developing and maintaining a production Meteor application for several years, here's my take on it: The Good Get started quickly Meteor is a really quick framework to get started with. Normally in

Reduce MySQL memory usage for low-end servers

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

How to add syntax highlighting to Posthaven

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

How to copy SSH keys to a server securely

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

web dev

Redirect requests to another site using Nginx

I recently moved my site from GitHub Pages to my own server. For the last couple of years, I had been hosting my domain asad.pw and www.asad.pw on GitHub pages, and that included my GitHub project sites HeadlessBrowsers and Awesome-Postgres. So far, I had been hosting the

web dev

Redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS with Nginx

I recently moved my blog away from GitHub pages to Ghost, and had to set up HTTPS redirects for the same. This is how you redirect HTTP requests to HTTPS with Nginx. You will likely have two site configuration files in your /etc/nginx/sites-enabled configuration directory. I have a

SQL

How to rename or delete a column in SQLite?

I recently worked on a project involving SQLite, and while creating database migrations, I realized that SQLite does not support the complete ALTER TABLE syntax completely. Out of the box, you are able to rename a table, or add a column to an existing table, but that's it.

web dev

File uploads with Meteor

MeteorJS is an amazing framework for developing web apps, and it is really helpful in increasing development speed. One of the few things that is not provided by Meteor OOTB is file uploads. Most apps will need file uploads at some point or the other, and one of the main

PyCharm CE vs Sublime Text for Python Development

PyCharm and Sublime Text are both great editors, and they are both recommended quite often for Python development. While PyCharm is a full-fledged IDE, Sublime Text is a sophisticated text editor that is massively extensible via plugins. But which one is better? Throughout the text of this post, whenever I

GitHub Language Popularity Statistics

I’ve been wanting to get an idea of the division between languages on GitHub for a while now. While there are some articles available on the matter, none of them were really clear. So I’ve decided to do some research of my own. Stars Currently, there are 68