Recently, I had the pleasure of setting up a project in VS Code for debugging. Visual Studio offers great support for debugging C#, C++, JavaScript run on Node.js or in the Chrome browser. Today, I’ll show you how to setup a Node.js app and Chrome app for debugging. To get started you’ll need to go ahead and open your project in VS Code. We’ll start with the Node.js app since it’s the simplest to start with.

I recently finished The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. It’s one of the most informative books on enduring programming practice that I’ve ever read. It makes the case that a 10x programmer is pragmatic and produces more code generation tools than actual code. It also deals with communication and project management skills in a similarly pragmatic fashion. One of the fundamental principles driving this book is the DRY principle of not repeating yourself.

Spoilers: one of the reasons is a built-in test framework

In my last post in this series I added some global state via a vuex store and got the conditional admin settings set up. In this post we’re going to add a simple Express.js server to store our todos and admin options. Express.js is a lightweight web framework that supports a wide variety of plugins, and is an ideal candidate for making a quick and dirty REST API to deliver our data back and forth from client to server.

In 2015 a new website, Advent of Code, was launched that introduced an advent calendar of programming challenges. The programming challenges at Advent of Code seem pretty well tailored to learning a new language, and because of that I decided to learn a few with the three years of challenges that have been published so far. The first one I picked to learn, Elixir, is billed as a highly concurrent functional programming language with the beautiful syntax and readability of Ruby.