Bits and bytes of code

In a recent side project I came upon the need to securely store credentials in a database that I can later retrieve and use as part of the application. I know that Node.js has a very extensive crypto module, so I knew it was possible, though I wasn't sure on the specifics.

I've been using Go a bit more lately for a side project I'm working on and I ran into a few instances where I needed to do use type assertions for some fairly flexible interfaces. While I could easily do what I needed to, it still feels weird.

Netlify has support for creating redirects and rewrites using the _redirects file syntax. Borrowing from an idea I saw from Kent C. Dodds and @caarlos0, I built a script to make it easy to create short links for my website or other sites that I can then access via my newly minted go.mskelton.dev subdomain.

I recently started using a tool called Zoxide from a friend's recommendation and I must say, it's pretty awesome. Zoxide is a smarter cd command that tracks your most used directories and allows you to jump to them with ease.

Building slideshows using Markdown is really convenient and fast. There are three great projects on GitHub which do this well, but I always forget their names, so posting them in this Byte for my own reference but also to promote each of these great open source projects.

Something that came up at work recently was joining buttons into a group. When joined, we wanted the buttons to have no border radius between them to achieve a nice visual aesthetic.

I've been working on a Rust side project lately and as I always do when I write Rust code, I find myself loving pattern matching even more than I did before. It seems like such a simple thing, sort of just a better if statement, but the more you use it, the more you realize just how powerful and elegant it really is.

We use GraphQL at work and one area that has always caused me a lot of pain is extracting a deeply nested, and deeply optional field from the GraphQL return type.

I was adding an expand/collapse feature to my website code blocks the other day, and I wanted to create an animation where the arrows flip vertically when you press the button.

A common challenge in React is managing state for components that have animations. For example, closing a modal after it transitions closed, resetting the state of a copy button after the animation finishes, or removing temporary height/width from expandable containers during open/close transitions.