Andreas' Blog

Adventures of a software engineer/architect

Programming ESP and other Arduino compatible chips using VS Code on MacOS

2020-12-28 4 min read anoff

When you are developing microcontroller based projects as a hobbyist you often end up with the Arduino ecosystem and might be tempted to use their IDE. This post will explain how you can develop, program & debug Arduino compatible devices using VS Code. Even though this post is written with a MacOS walk-through it should be valid for other operation systems as well.

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Publishing private npm packages to GitHub Package registry for free

2020-07-26 4 min read anoff

Even though I am a big fan of Open Source Software and try to make my projects open and consumable by others as well, there are cases where you want to keep your stuff private. But even if you work in a closed source environment you still want to use the same tools that you employ in the open source world. In this blog post I will explain how you can create private npm packages for your Javascript/Typescript projects - and I will show you how you can host your private npm packages for free!

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Migrating to vuetify 2.1

2019-10-06 6 min read anoff
I just migrated the code for the devradar editor to the latest major version of vuetify. There is an officiel migration guide that helped me solve 70% of the issues but here is a quick overview of the biggest issues I encountered and what actually changed. Note: This post has been updated on 2019-11-01 with a chapter on the new grid system v-flex ➡️ v-col Caution: 🚨 This was written for a migration from vuetify 1. Continue reading

Preview AsciiDoc with PlantUML in VS Code

2019-05-08 4 min read anoff
This post is for everyone that likes to write AsciiDoc in VS Code but also wants to inline PlantUML diagrams within their docs. In a previous post about diagrams with PlantUML I gave an intro into PlantUML and how to preview images in VS Code. With the latest release of the asciidoctor plugin for VS Code it is possible to easily preview embedded PlantUML images within AsciiDocs. No more need to maintain attributes in each file 🎉 Continue reading

Get Hugo to render (nice) Asciidocs

2019-02-17 5 min read anoff
While migrating my blog from Jekyll to Hugo I went down quite a rabbit hole. While setup and migration to Hugo was a breeze, I spent a lot of time making my .adoc formatted post work with the new blog. After working through several GitHub issues I ended up manipulating the DOM with Javascript to get admonitions working. It still doesn’t feel right - but hey it works! 🤷‍♂️ This post will cover the steps I took in case I myself or anyone out there ever needs to do this again. Continue reading

Converting existing AsciiDoc into an Antora project

2019-02-15 7 min read anoff
After 2 years of working with the arc42 template in markdown, I spent the last few weeks learning about an asciidoc based site generator named Antora. The main reason for the interest in AsciiDoc was the fact that the limited feature set in markdown often impairs you while writing down complex things. But I had one problem; most of our documentation is scattered across multiple repositories as we try to keep the docs as close to the code as possible. Continue reading

Markdown native diagrams with PlantUML

2018-07-31 9 min read anoff
This post covers PlantUML basics and how it can be used in GitLab or GitHub projects as well as a seamless local development environment using Visual Studio Code. I have been wanting to write this post for months. Lately I have been using PlantUML extensively at work but also in my private projects. You can see it being used in my plantbuddy and techradar projects on GitHub. Using it in different places and for various purposes I came across a bunch of issues that I want to share in this post. Continue reading

Building realtime apps with Vue and nodeJS

2018-04-18 7 min read anoff
Wanting to build a simple SPA as a side project I struggled with things that might annoy a lot of newcomers that do not want to go full vanilla. Which web framework, which style library, which server framework - and more importantly how does it all work together? In this post we will put together a bunch of great tools out there to build a realtime web app with a few single lines of code. Continue reading