Will Belden

Recent Blog Comments By Will Belden

• Coming Soon: Feature Flags - From Concept To Cultural Revolution

  Posted on Sep 11, 2023 at 1:27 PM

  I think it's great that you're writing a book. The wife wrote a couple, I co-wrote one with her. (Non-technical content.) It's very rewarding! Maybe not a path to riches, but I don't think that's always a goal!... read more »

• Working Code Podcast - Episode 141: Building Stuff So You Can Build Stuff

  Posted on Aug 23, 2023 at 1:32 PM

  (from ChatGPT, and how I always heard it:) Guy Kawasaki is a well-known entrepreneur and author who has worked for companies like Apple and has been involved in various startups and ventures. He has emphasized the importance of "eating your own dog food" in his writings and talks.... read more »

• Auto-Saving Form Data In The Background Using The fetch() API

  Posted on Jul 31, 2023 at 2:39 PM

  Was comparing fetch() to xhr() and jQuery.ajax() functions after seeing this. Fetch, unfortunately, doesn't send or receive any cookies (could be good OR bad), so you'd have to have an alternative session management if being logged in is required. I think. I read it all really fast!... read more »

• Adobe ColdFusion Returns NULL Dates As NULL When Using CFQuery ReturnType "Array"

  Posted on Jul 7, 2023 at 12:41 PM

  We have SO much code that is bascally: <cfif structKeyExists(local.thing, "key") AND len(trim(local.thing.key)) GT 0> Like...SO much. I almost wish we had a base.cfc function called hasValue(struct, key) .... read more »

• Replacing jQuery (110kb) With Umbrella JS (8kb)

  Posted on May 7, 2023 at 12:33 AM

  I know this is an older post, but I saw Umbrella mentioned from your latest Hotwire post. Decided to look into it. Seemed awesome (smaller size, equivalent functionality, etc.) until I started Google "vs" results. Ending up coming across some other variations like Cash and Zept... read more »

• Working Code Podcast - Episode 82: GitHub Charging For Copilot

  Posted on Jul 6, 2022 at 3:11 PM

  As far as I can tell, it's all from "your code". I think it runs locally, mostly, and dependent on your CPU, resources. There is a paid version that is "smarter" (I guess?) and talks to their servers. I found it to be pretty amazing, just the local, free version. You ... read more »

• Working Code Podcast - Episode 82: GitHub Charging For Copilot

  Posted on Jul 6, 2022 at 2:34 PM

  Been a pretty big fan of the Tabnine extension for VSCode. Not sure if it's the same thing, but I can't imagine how different it could be. Will have to research it, but pretty sure, too, I won't be paying for it! :)... read more »

• Updating My Mental Model For Shared Array / Struct Iteration In ColdFusion

  Posted on Jun 23, 2022 at 4:03 PM

  Are you hitting the page request (the .cfm file) twice, immediately to get two threads going simultaneously? I'm not quite grokking how you're getting the two threads, each running parallel operations of the struct and array.... read more »

• The 15th Annual Regular Expression Day - June 1st 2022

  Posted on Jun 1, 2022 at 5:04 PM

  I call regex the "Black Magic". If you're a tenured wizard, sure, otherwise it's the devil's work! Joking aside, when you get a regex working like you want, it's awesome!... read more »

• Dynamically Enabling / Disabling Session Management In Lucee CFML 5.3.8.201

  Posted on May 21, 2022 at 2:49 PM

  I do something similar, to extend session timeouts. I use Commandbox locally for development, and I hate having to login when I pick back up tomorrow, or later today, in my coding efforts. If my domain name has the "local" in it, or it detects my local subnet IP range... I get f... read more »

• Considering The Separation Of Concerns When Invoking A Remote API In ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 26, 2022 at 3:17 PM

  Ben, yes, "data" is one of the keys. { "success" : true ,"data" : {} ,"messages" : {"errors":[],"warnings":[],"success":[]} } I do format a little differently for the (heavy) use of DataTables, since it has a specifi... read more »

• Considering The Separation Of Concerns When Invoking A Remote API In ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 26, 2022 at 1:50 PM

  I've had pretty good luck with this function, for ALL transmission requests outside the system. (At least for JSON-based operations.) <cffunction name="transmitDataJSON" access="public" output="false" returntype="struct" hint="JSON based transmi... read more »

• On Always Returning Collections From Data Access Layers (DAL) In ColdFusion

  Posted on Apr 18, 2022 at 3:42 PM

  What we do for a DAL is this: All services have a DAO. Let's say "CustomerService" and "CustomerDAO". CustomerService has: .getCustomerByID(id) .getCustomerSearch(CustomerSearchCriteria) Our BaseSearchCriteria object contains things like paginatio... read more »

• I'm Excited When People Leave My Company

  Posted on Sep 2, 2016 at 10:39 AM

  When I left my job of 5 years (about two years ago), my boss was very understanding. He's also a friend whom I do camping trips with, board gaming and poker, too. So, we still hung out quite frequently. I was at the new gig for a year and a half when Mr. Boss approached me and asked "what'll... read more »

• RxJS Streams Are Inconsistently Asynchronous In Angular 2 Beta 6

  Posted on Feb 22, 2016 at 8:39 AM

  If you move the .delay(10) to the getStreamA() in the first example, do you get the same console output? Line 59 instead of 67.... read more »

• The Regular Expression Cookbook By Steven Levithan And Jan Goyvaerts

  Posted on Apr 2, 2014 at 3:44 PM

  I used to consider all regex to be "black magic". My boss would say "I made a cool regex to do this or that" and I would ward him off with the sign of the cross and do a ritual cleansing. Lately, however, I have found myself using regex more and more. (A lot thanks to PowerGREP... read more »

• How To Store Arbitrary And Transient Attributes With Your User Data

  Posted on Jan 15, 2014 at 10:26 AM

  Optionally, since you seem to be indicating the user would be logged in, so you'd know who they are, you could load their "extra" data into session storage, and just flush/commit any changes to these areas (session.userFlags, whatever) in onSessionEnd(), or something similar. Then you cou... read more »

• How To Store Arbitrary And Transient Attributes With Your User Data

  Posted on Jan 15, 2014 at 10:13 AM

  Ooops. Re-reading, I see you have a similar option next. My eyes must've missed it!... read more »

• How To Store Arbitrary And Transient Attributes With Your User Data

  Posted on Jan 15, 2014 at 10:12 AM

  One thought is: "You're close" with "Adding Additional Columns To Your User Table". Instead of that, though, why not add a separate table, linked by the UserID as a foreign key. Then you keep your primary user data clean, but can throw any old column in. If you're using MSSQL,... read more »