One of the tools that I have found extremely useful and easy to use while developing against another API is called MockServer . MockServer is tool that will allow you to create a local server that will respond to requests and take actions based on the configuration that you provide. This is really useful for when you want to mock the API responses that would be returned from various API calls. To use this tool, you need to provide a json file that contains the expectations you would like the service to take action on.

Update: If you would prefer to watch a video on this content, you can see the content here on YouTube: Developer Bytes - Generating Templates With Plopjs.

In one of my recent developer bytes articles, I discussed with you some of the benefits of the micro-generator framework tool Plop and how I used this tool in my day to day. In this article I want to expand on the example the example I shared in the last article. So, in this tutorial we will be creating a Plop generator that will create a Vue component in TypeScript, and we will be going over the basics to create your own generators.

Update: If you would prefer to watch a video on this content, you can see the content here on YouTube: Developer Bytes - Generating Templates With Plopjs.

For the first Developer Bytes article, I wanted to share with everyone a tool that I have found extremely useful and easy to use called Plop . Plop is a micro-generator framework that can be used for generating new files in a consistent manner using templates you define. This simple tool gives you a way to generate code or any type of file, by running a simple console command.

It has been quite some time since I released new content on my blog, and it is something that I have been wanting to devote more time to. Between working a full time job, finishing up my Masters Degree, being a father, and the craziness of the past two years with Covid and isolating, it has been a very challenging and interesting time.

In order to start producing more content on a regular basis, I decided to try out a new type of content post: developer bytes. The goal of these posts are to share tips and tools that I use in my day to day work. These articles are meant to be smaller in scope with a focus on something that is meaningful, with the option to always expand on that topic either via comments or with dedicated posts that explore that topic further.

GitHub Actions is a fantastic CI/CD platform that allows you to set up custom workflows to do a variety of tasks, anything from running unit tests anytime there is a pull request to building your web application and deploying that application to your hosting service.

If you are not familiar with CI/CD, this is a method to allow you to frequently deliver software by introducing automation into your development process. The main concepts for CI/CD are: continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. As an example, let’s say you are working on an npm package and every time there is a pull request there is a setup of steps that you complete while reviewing the code: running unit tests, linting, updating documentation, etc. Then once the pull request is approved and merged, you then manually release a new version of the package and publish that package to the npm registry.

As a developer, one of the things I strive to do is reuse my code across my various projects when possible, and one of the best tools available to do this is the npm registry. If you are not familiar, npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language and npm is the default package manager for the Node.js runtime environment. npm is a free registry that allows you to publish both public and private npm packages that can be shared with other npm users.

The newest version of Kontra.js brings some breaking changes as well as a bunch of new features. Some of the new features include:

• TypeScript support
• New GameObject class that is now the parent of the Sprite class
• Button - allows you to create accessible buttons for your game
• Text - allows you to write text to the canvas
• Scene - helps you organize the different parts of your game
• and much more!

You can read the full release notes on GitHub here: Kontra Release v7.0.0.

For the second day, I decided to take the code I worked on in day 1 and to refactor it. For the first step, I broke up the code into new classes. Once I had this working, I decided that I wanted to try and create a plugin from this code so that way the code could be re-used in other projects. I also ran into some issues with my linting, so I updated the project to use the typescript version of the airbnb config.

For the first day, I decided to start simple and focus on getting the codebase setup that way I can keep my daily log and code in the same repository. Since I decided to use TypeScript for my challenge, this meant that I would need something to transpile my code so it can run in the browser, and I already had a template setup to do this. However, I didn’t want to create a seperate code base for each example since it would be hard to maintain, and ideally I only wanted one configuration file for the whole challenge. By doing this, it allows me to compile and run my code from one location, and allows anyone who clones the codebase to do the same.

Between work, home life, and the side projects I am working on, I haven’t been spending as much time on my game development projects as I would like. So in order to change things up, I thought it would be fun to challenge myself to coding an hour a day with the Phaser 3 framework by doing the #100DaysOfCode challenge. If you are not familiar, the #100DaysOfCode is a challenge to code for one hour a day for the next 100 days and to publicly commit to the challenge by tweeting your progress each day.