August 2023: Introducing a new weekly podcast Front-end Fire!
And a final blog post about using GitHub Actions to automate file copying from one repo to another - yes, it is possible.
Hey everybody,
Nearly everyone is back from their holidays and roadtrips, the kids are heading back to school, and even though it’s still really hot outside, fall is just around the corner.
Here’s hoping you’re looking forward to the changing of the seasons and getting back into more of a routine.
Ready to hear about what’s been going on for August? I’ve got plenty of goodies to share.
My friends Jack, TJ, and I launched our very own weekly web development podcast, Front-end Fire!
For the last 3 years, I’ve co-hosted a React-focused podcast, and this summer my co-hosts Jack Herrington, TJ VanToll, and I decided we wanted to branch out beyond just talking about React into more general web development topics, and Front-end Fire was born.
Each Monday we drop a new episode where we cover the latest and greatest news happening now in the web dev world, and from time to time, we’ll even have special guests on to talk about new releases or cool stuff they’re doing.
It’s a lot of fun hosting and I hope you’ll give it a listen if you want to keep up to date with the fast paced world of front-end development.
I published the last blog in a short series I’ve been writing about copying files from one repo to another automatically with GitHub Actions.
Earlier this year I tackled building an open source software library for the Notehub API - an API for interacting with the Blues cloud service Notehub. (Full disclosure: I work for Blues as a software engineer).
The library I built is a JavaScript-based library to interact with Notehub easily within JavaScript projects, and it is actually generated from the Notehub project’s openapi.yaml
file.
Since the Notehub service is constantly being improved upon, I wanted an automated way to copy the openapi.yaml
file whenever it was updated to the Notehub JS repo so I could easily update the library and publish it to npm, and I did so with the help of a GitHub Actions workflow.
In my article, I go into detail about how I set up the workflow in the Notehub repo to trigger whenever the file changed, copy the file, check out the Notehub JS repo, add the file to it, and push the changes in a new branch that would then alert me via email to review it.
A very specific use case, I’ll admit, but I can already envision other scenarios where this sort of thing will come in handy again, and I bet you might too.
And I wrote about how to easily transport your VS Code settings and configurations with the Settings Sync plugin.
Once upon a time, VS Code didn’t automatically let you save all your configurations options into GitHub so that retrieving them on any machine a piece of cake.
So an enterprising individual made a free plugin called Settings Sync that made it possible, and as it saved me countless hours trying to remember all my favorite plugins and perfect coding environment, I felt the need to share it with the world so that others could be saved the time and heartache as well.
Even though it’s less relevant today, it’s always good to remember the humble beginnings of many of VS Codes best features: the web dev community making things useful for themselves and others.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of September,
- Paige
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