Because my Uptime Kuma monitoring instance runs on a home network sharing the same flaky 4G connection as the VPS sites it watches, I consider Uptime Robot before deploying a second instance on Fly.io’s free tier. Setting it up as a Docker container proves simple, and to fold the remote status back into my local instance I discover Uptime Kuma already exposes an SVG status badge usable with keyword monitoring, avoiding a custom scraping endpoint...
After ChatGPT flagged that mdserver might allow path traversal attacks, I used Bruno, an under-development Postman/Insomnia alternative, to check whether Express was sanitizing URLs properly. ChatGPT generated pass and fail URL examples, I wrote asserts for each in Bruno, and the whole collection can be run at once. A side benefit is that requests are stored as version-controllable text committed alongside the rest of the code...
After Insomnia forced account creation and my saved API requests disappeared, I switched to Bruno, a free and open-source API client available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, plus a CLI and VS Code plugins. Bruno stores request collections as human-readable text files, making them easy to commit to source control alongside code. The writeup includes my first impressions after an afternoon of use...
I deploy a small Node.js and Express service from my MacBook to an Ubuntu VPS, covering the choice between a native install and a Docker container, installing Node and npm via apt (including why the Ubuntu repository version is quite old), and copying project files to the server with scp rather than setting up git-based CI/CD for such a tiny project. I test with Insomnia instead of Postman, which I avoid because of its data collection...
A short YouTube video on building REST APIs with Node and Express prompts a plan to replace my existing weather data setup—a Python cron job on a VPS that writes API results to a text file served by NGINX—with a Node.js endpoint that fetches and caches fresh weather data on request. This would cut the up-to-ten-minute staleness of temperature data polled by homelab servers, and I break the work into small steps, starting with replicating the current text-file behaviour in Node behind NGINX...
A short write-up of a mixed content error that appeared when I called the Open Notify ISS location API from a page hosted on GitHub Pages over HTTPS. I explain why browsers block insecure requests from secure pages, note that the API doesn’t support HTTPS and GitHub Pages can’t serve over HTTP, and describe switching to the wheretheiss.at API, which supports HTTPS, as the fix...
My #100DaysOfSwiftUI challenge post is about adding profile pictures to a Friendface app. Swift’s hashValue turns out to be non-deterministic between runs, so I write a simple string hash by hand to pick stable photo numbers. After Unsplash proves unreliable, I settle on RandomUser.me portraits and consider using the genderize.io API to match gender from names...
How to decode JSON in Swift when the key names don’t match your struct’s property names. I cover using a CodingKeys enum to map JSON keys to properties manually, and the simpler keyDecodingStrategy option for handling the common snake_case versus camelCase mismatch...
