My Life and Code

With the Christmas season nearly upon us once again , I thought I'd take a few minutes to write about some of my favorite Christmas songs. As an adult, I've found it difficult to get into the holiday spirit each year because there's always a lot happening. As a kid, the world almost seems to stop as the holidays approach and arrive, but as an adult, things just keep on moving. One of the few things that has any affect on my mood during this time is the music, almost always because of some sort of nostalgia, and even then, there are times when it does nothing for me. But I digress. Here's a list, in no particular order, of my 10 favorite Christmas songs. Sleigh Ride - Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops This one's my all-time favorite. It's an instrumental version that's been around since long before I was born, that I first heard on an album my mother would play when I was a little kid. My earliest memory of it was from when I was about 4 or 5 years old. I th...

I've been meaning to write this for a while. Normally in my Angular unit tests, I set up my service mocks and then let dependency injection treat them as if they're the real thing. But sometimes you'll need to cast a service mock as a spy so you can do things like reset the calls it's made. And it's one of those things I always have to think back and remember "How did I do that last time?". Here's an example of how: const mockScoreAdminService = TestBed.inject(ScoreAdminService) as jasmine.SpyObj<ScoreAdminService>; mockScoreAdminService.processScores.calls.reset(); This code casts the service mock, which is treated as the real service type, to a Jasmine spy object. It then resets the calls made to the processScores  method to zero. I hope this helps someone!

Something I ran into a few months back was that Angular won't reset a FormControl back to its initial value if you call reset()  on the FormGroup unless that FormControl was created with nonNullable: true . Here's an example:   private createForms ( formBuilder : FormBuilder ) : void {     //For the initial values to be considered the *default* values, we need to specify nonNullable: true.     //There used to be a dedicated property for this, but they deprecated it.     this . searchForm = formBuilder . group < ISearchForm >({       adminYear : new FormControl < number >( null , { validators : Validators . required }),       admin : new FormControl < string >( 'All' , { nonNullable : true , validators : Validators . required }), //Validator is kind of pointless here, as there WILL always be a value       examName : new FormControl < string | null >( null ), ...

This isn't something that's come up too often in my experience with Angular, but sometimes I've needed to write code that subscribes to Router.events and takes action based on the current route. But how do you test something like that in a unit test? The key is by using a Subject , which is a kind of Observable , and exposes a next() method, which allows us to simulate a route change. Here's an example:     const event = new NavigationEnd ( 1703 , `/account/orders/ ${ orderId } ` , '/' );     ( router . events as Subject < Event >). next ( event ); By casting Router's events property as a Subject , we can call next() with our NavigationEnd event, and simulate the route change. For the Event type, make sure you are importing Event from @angular/router .

The first time I really listened to Led Zeppelin was in my junior year of high school, when my friend John gave me a copy of Led Zeppelin IV  for Christmas. It was one of those rare, consistent albums that I could listen to from start to finish without wanting to skip a track. Not too long after that I picked up Houses of the Holy  and was surprised to find that I liked that  album even more . Sometime after that , I picked up Led Zeppelin II , which I didn't like as much as the other two albums I already had. After high school, I picked up the boxed set . This was my first exposure to a lot of the tracks from the albums I didn't own. One of the things about the boxed set that I heard people say they didn't like was that the tracks were out of chronological order, and it can be kind of confusing as to which song came from which album. A few years later I picked up the second boxed set which included all of the remaining studio tracks not on the first boxed set (pretty coo...

  If you don’t know how something works, how can you fix it when it doesn’t  work? This is why I’m not entirely behind something like GitHub Copilot. It’s already easy for developers to copy and paste code they find on the internet and implement it without understanding how it works. Here’s a ridiculous, real-world example. In 1979, “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” was released. It had amazing special effects but awful pacing. It’s a slow movie, to put it lightly. Yet it’s been re-released twice in the past 20 years with additional special effects work…and not much done to improve its pace. The special effects were never the problem, but that’s what they’ve “fixed”, twice. This is a movie which includes a 10 minute long sequence with no dialog, just the characters flying through a cloud and looking at a viewscreen. They might as well have put the word “Intermission” on the screen during this sequence so the audience would know they could get up, use the bathroom, and not miss a...