Recently, I wrote a GUI app using Vala and GTK4, PNG Tool. Having written GTK+3 GUI apps before, much of what I knew worked as expected or at least put me on the right track. However, FileChooserDialog is now deprecated. We developers are encouraged to use FileDialog instead. Unfortunately, there does not seem to be an examples of how to use FileDialog today so let's change that.

Recently, I wrote about Unit Testing Vala. The big take away from that post is how expectations from using interpreted languages don't always translate to compiled code. However, there is a huge gap in my post because I fell back to using make while most Vala projects seem to have standardized on Meson. Today, I've worked through a number of problems I had with Meson and adopted it in my project. In the interests of helping the next person trying Vala, let me share what I've learned.

Over the past week I spent a bit of time learning Vala. It was fun, I kept finding myself in the situation of wanting to just make one more improvement but no I had to get dinner going. I did however stumble when it came to unit testing. I've become so accustomed to pulling a test harness like phpunit, mocha, or pytest into a project and using experience to write tests. Unfortunately that experience did not translate to this project well. I did eventually figure out testing but the story may be worth more than a how to.

Years ago I did a project where I wrote out a test plan, actions I needed to check work in a product before pushing changes to that product into production. That list of tests prevented more than one bug from reaching production but it was time consuming and tedious. Long story short, I now use Bruno as an essential test tool. In this post I take you from zero to a point where you can use Bruno effectively in your own projects.

Over the past week I've spent about three days rewriting an old project from scratch. I kept the same requirements but have been rewriting it with ten years more experience. At this point I have a database design that is largely uncharged, an API written in PHP using the Clean Code inspired layer cake structure with a high level of unit test coverage, api tests, and a single page web application that supports login, log out, resuming sessions, and routing to content based on the location. I could perhaps have gotten further if I had used a framework, an ORM, or generative AI. I am not sure I would have the same kind of trust in the code nor would I have accomplished a key goal for me: re-examining the tech stack I've been evolving over the past five years to see if there are places for improvement.

Turns out there are a couple places for improvement that I have been over looking. So today I thought I'd take a break and write about one that is obvious in retrospect but completely missed in every tutorial, guide, or Stack Overflow post I've found.

In the beginning we had semantic markup because the people writing HTML were scientist and like minded nerds just trying to share research. Then the internet took off and everybody had to have a website. Tools were created to build websites and those tools let designers build templates for content owners to use to create pages. Templates broke easily and constantly. Next came content management systems with plugins that filled in templates for you. This was worse because the templates were harder to create and still broke. Along came HTML 5 and things looked better for a brief minute. Then came javascript frameworks and appification. The frameworks changed daily, added security problems, and still the templates still broke. Sure, dedicated folks could craft a website and maintain consistency the hard way by hand but who has time for that?

Sure would be nice if there was a way to return to the early days of semantic markup where you use HTML elements and the browser renders your page consistent with the rest of the content on your site without frameworks, plugins, management systems and expensive tools.

Fortunately modern HTML includes a set of technologies that can be combined to create html elements, Web Components, that work like templates without frameworks, plugins, or expensive tooling.

It is reasonable to ask if it is possible to write secure code? I think the answer you'll most likely hear from experienced developers is "maybe". Our incentives to deliver features fast without counteracting pressures to slow us down and focus on quality set us up for failure. However, over time, we as an industry have developed a set of guidelines that allow us to do reasonably well. Most commonly I hear these practices referred to as "Defensive Programming".

GitHub has become yet another Microsoft property; bloated, unstable, and hostile to users. Therefore, I have chosen to follow the lead of Zig and move on. Moving forward I am hosting my projects on Codeberg.org

I have a web site project and I want to add some bar charts to it. You might think in 2025 that would be easy. To be fair there are lots of choices but they all seem to come with dependencies e.g. React. My project doesn't use React… Fortunately, all the major browsers today support web components. So I created a web component for displaying bar charts.

In an ideal world there would be no need to comment code. We wouldn't have to spend time writing comments, rewriting comments, reading comments, or scrolling past comments to find the next block of code. Unfortunately, this is not the world we live in.

Code comments are a help line for your PR reviewer, your coworkers, and your future self that might just help them out on their darkest day. It can feel like a chore. Comments can even detract from your work when done poorly. But when done well, comments can be be immensely helpful.

I had a need to detect the presence of magnets especially small grain of sand sized magnets such as those found in certain mineral samples. The ideal tool for the job would be a magnetometer with milli-Gauss sensitivity and the ability to measure the strength of static (non oscillating) magnetic fields. I also didn't want to spend a fortune on it especially since it was not important to us to measure the field strength only detect it. After searching the likely suppliers I realized there was not a commercial solution that would work. Fortunately, there are readily available breakout boards which expose an i2c interface to an LSM303 series accelerometer/magnetometer sensor; so I could build my own.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

If you are using a Linux PC to upload a firmware application to an Arduino compatible but not an Arduino brand device sometimes you will get the oddest errors. On Adafruit brand boards this will be accompanied by odd LED pulsing even after double tapping the reset button to put the board in bootloader mode. The fix is fairly simple…

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Back in 2005 there was just a single way to program an Arduino; the Arduino IDE. Today in 2019 the concept of “what is an Arduino” has changed from a microcontroller produced by a single vendor to arguably any board that can be programmed using the Arduino IDE. And in this time, a variety of methods for programming Arduinos* beyond the Arduino IDE have been released. The goal of this post is to list and compare some methods in use at Bucknell.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Interrupts have a reputation for being tricky and an unnecessary complication to just get code running. This reputation is however ill-deserved. Interrupts when used correctly simplify code, speed execution on hardware, and allow projects to do more with less powerful hardware.

Originally published at https://arduino.scholar.bucknell.edu/

Over the course of my career I've been asked numerous times to "fix" a website. Something I have noticed is that most times the broken nature of the website has been due to a previous developer going out of their way to work against the inherent structures and default styling of web pages. I suspect this is because many designers pick up a tool and start using it without understanding what the tool does. Imagine if a woodcrafter picked a block plane out of a bin at a rummage sale then tried to build a dining room table without using any other tools. Personally I find that understanding the material is extremely important to success which is why I threw together a sampler of built in HTML elements with minimal styling. I continue to refer to this sampler when starting new projects and have found a zen of minimalist markup when crafting web sites.