Recent by Eric McCormick 

Making Working From Home Work - Dev | Blog  

By Eric McCormick | 3/18/20, 7:08 PM | Business - Events / People | Added by Oliver Busse

It may not be a great time for going out, but it's my hope everyone finds some small way to celebrate and have a bit of fun, since lots of peoples's anxiety levels are probably elevated. In any case, have a good, fun time, and hopefully don't do anything that'll scare the pets, kids, or your spouse.

Good News and a little retrospective  

By Eric McCormick | 1/24/18, 1:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The past year has been great fun. I’ve had a couple of major changes, including a change in job and beginning to work from home. I’ve also done a few different projects that I hadn’t been involved in before. I’ll get to those in a little bit, but first.. I am quite happy to have been named an IBM Champion, returning for the fourth year in a row.

Composing With Docker  

By Eric McCormick | 11/2/17, 9:24 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

About a year ago, I blogged on automating server upgrades with Docker and a BASH script. This met the needs I had at the time, and worked itself out to be pretty stable. But, since I think about such things and always question my preconceptions, I went down a path of creating a Docker compose config file, something I wouldn’t have had to create from scratch by waiting a little while as one appeared as an example from GitLab.

Notes in 9: Dev Tools Grab Bag  

By Eric McCormick | 4/5/17, 11:03 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

I’m on Notes in 9 again, with a “grab bag” of a couple of tools I’ve put together recently that may be of a varying degree of useful for other Domino + XPages developers. You don’t need these to do development, but for the right person, they may help with their development workflow.

Custom JSON Serialization With GSON  

By Eric McCormick | 1/23/17, 8:40 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here’s a curious one, in which I found myself with a limitation of not being able to output JSON with scientific notation values. If you’re wondering why that is, since both JSON and JavaScript allow scientific notation of number values, you are absolutely correct and that’s a great question.

Rebirth: An App of Ice and Fire  

By Eric McCormick | 12/14/16, 11:22 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

If you read my blog for any of the Saga of Servlets series, then I hope that you’re excited I’m returning to the application I put together for it. This time, it’s as a conversation piece in regards to some of the build process modernization I engaged in recently, in order to unify the code base in its git repository.

Scripting Server Upgrades  

By Eric McCormick | 11/11/16, 11:14 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

This one might be slight departure from my usual, but those that have followed my blogging this past year will have noticed a bit more of a leaning towards DevOps in some of my posts. This echoes a lot of what I’ve been concluding as increasingly a necessary part of development.

MWLUG Success and some thoughts on themes of the conference  

By Eric McCormick | 8/24/16, 7:45 AM | Business - Events / People | Added by John Oldenburger

MWLUG was a great success as far as I’m concerned. Each time I’ve gone I’ve had the great enjoyment of being able to attend some high quality sessions, meet with lots of colleagues and friends from the community, and get a view into products and solutions many people are undertaking, over conversations and interactions outside of the sessions.

Manually Renewing HTTPS w/ Let's Encrypt  

By Eric McCormick | 7/27/16, 11:36 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

A while back, I rolled a personal project, which is a Node app, to Bluemix for lightweight use. I managed to make use of Let’s Encrypt for the HTTPS certificate, but only after realizing that there was a bit of a manual aspect to it that is the antithesis of an automated script for such things.

Git History Searching  

By Eric McCormick | 7/12/16, 10:07 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Here’s a quick tip from an example case I ran into at the day job relatively recently. I had a situation in which, due to one reason or another, a section of code had disappeared from an application. I happened to know exactly which design element (file) it disappeared from and, while I could have done so, I didn’t feel like only restoring the code (from an old, known working version), I also wanted to know what commit in my git repository showed its removal.

In Defense of Bower  

By Eric McCormick | 6/14/16, 8:59 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

In case you’ve been living under a rock, bower is a package manager meant for web libraries/frameworks. It runs on top of Node and installs via npm. If this is new to you, you can probably see some pretty obvious advantages, such as the ability to keep libraries outside of your application’s project repository.

Site Anchors  

By Eric McCormick | 6/1/16, 4:25 PM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Site anchors, also known as anchor links, are a way to “deep link” your site with consistently navigable content. Such an approach often makes use of the ability for a browser to load/jump/scroll-to a named element (such as a heading or div) by its id attribute.

Enhanced Editors  

By Eric McCormick | 5/27/16, 8:00 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Recently, I had a couple of experiences stick out in my mind that made me think I should blog about some “fancy editors”. I’ve referenced them in a couple of my sessions, used SublimeText heavily in the past, and I’ve always been one willing to try out new things.

ICONUS and Other Topics  

By Eric McCormick | 5/19/16, 8:52 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

If you were able to attend the ICON US (formerly IamLUG) virtual event, then you lucked out. There were a great many good sessions that I was sadly not able to attend all of, on account of unavoidable travel (more on that in a minute).

Using Node to Connect to a Notes/Domino NSF  

By Eric McCormick | 4/22/16, 7:45 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m back, with the third in my 3-part series on connecting to “almost anything”. This time, we’ll be interacting with a Notes/Domino NSF, via the domino-nsf packge (on npm) by Nils Tarjei Hjelme. This package is something I learned of in the #dominonodejs channel of the OpenNTF Slack chat.

Using Node to Connect to an IBM i  

By Eric McCormick | 4/20/16, 10:45 AM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

I’m back, this time with a spin on the base application I established in the last post. This flavor of things will utilize JDBC to connect to a DB2 table on an IBM i.

Source Control Thoughts  

By Eric McCormick | 4/4/16, 4:14 PM | - | Added by Oliver Busse

Amongst several things lately, such as basement remodeling, configuring my new home NAS, and yard work, I’ve had a few interesting thoughts on my mind lately. In fact, I’ve started up a couple of interesting side projects. Before I’m ready to share those, I have to shout about something from the roof tops. Ready?

Headless DDE Builds With Jenkins CI  

By Eric McCormick | 3/25/16, 9:17 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Last time I described a major building block which has made my efforts to have a build automation machine (in the process of being turned into a vm) for my largest application. This includes a number of advantages, from being able to produce a copy of the application design at a given commit/tag/version from its git repository on demand or on schedule.

XSLTProc in the Buff  

By Eric McCormick | 3/24/16, 9:46 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The DORA project (Domino On-disk Repository Assistant) from Cameron Gregor has gone through a couple incarnations, originally as DORA, then again as a plugin to Domino Designer (DDE), called Swiper. These are both great projects, benefitting the community in that our (git for dora) scm repositories (for swiper) are much tidier and there are less issues with the overhead of the metadata/etc. files (particularly with swiper).

Nerdy Yet Awesome  

By Eric McCormick | 2/26/16, 8:14 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Here’s something that I cooked up a little while back, then found a further use for, then found an even greater use; it was an evolutionary project that sort of took off and helped me to learn a few things and adopt some new tools, which is always nice.

Notes in 9: Docker + SonarQube  

By Eric McCormick | 2/25/16, 1:01 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m on Notes in 9 again. This time, I’m back with an introduction to general use of SonarQube, a great tool for code quality checking and coverage reporting which Christian Güdemann talked about in his IBM Connect session.

Connect Success  

By Eric McCormick | 2/2/16, 3:26 PM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

IBM Connect 2016 is in full swing and I’m enjoying the sessions I’ve attended, some of the news announced from some of the IBM talent that has presented, and even had a good time at my session. Thank you to everyone that came to my session; we had a decent turn out. The promise of an “amazing demo” was, I hope, mostly true.

Starting Small to Go Big  

By Eric McCormick | 1/8/16, 9:13 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I was recently contacted to help clarify a couple of parts involved with getting set up similarly to what I’ve been moving towards and blogging about, both as far as project folder structure and as far as IDE setup. The developer was looking to get started with an app using a different client-side framework from what I usually work with, but that’s far from a problem, since they’re both part of the client-side puzzle and fit in as client-side assets.

2015: A Year In Review  

By Eric McCormick | 1/5/16, 8:35 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

It’s a new year! 2016 is here and it’s off to a great start. I had some excellent time off with family, as I hope everyone else did, and I’m looking forward to what 2016 will bring, after such a successful 2015. In my day job, we’ve restructured how we go through our application development lifecycle and it is paying off with every feature release and major release.

Task Runners pt.4  

By Eric McCormick | 12/17/15, 9:09 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Last time, we covered how to install, configure, and use gulp to automate some useful tasks and how gulp is differentiated from Grunt. Moving ahead, it would be remiss if I didn’t cover some more of my Gulpfile.js, so in the effort of completing the immediate picture, here’s a collection of more of my tasks, broken apart for description.

Task Runners pt.3  

By Eric McCormick | 12/8/15, 9:51 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

So, you may be wondering, why use gulp as opposed to Grunt? Honestly, if you’re familiar with one already, go with what you know; they’re both rather awesome and gulp, while newer, is gaining popularity enough to rival Grunt in its presence.

Task Runners pt.2: Grunt  

By Eric McCormick | 12/4/15, 8:01 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

The two most common and well known task runners (though there are others, of course) are currently Grunt and gulp. There is a fair amount of overlap in what they seek to accomplish, but as with many open source projects, where they differ is in implementation and intent.

Notes in 9: Nginx + PageSpeed  

By Eric McCormick | 12/4/15, 7:54 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

I’m on Notes in 9 again. This time, I’m back with a highlights tour of my MWLUG session. The subject is using Nginx as a reverse proxy in front of Domino, in combination with Google PageSpeed, to performance enhance your application, offload HTTPS certificate handling, and apply additional features to potentially improve your users’ experience.

Task Runners pt.1, An Introduction  

By Eric McCormick | 12/2/15, 11:25 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

This series has been cooking longer than my turkey (about two weeks longer). It covers ground on a fair number of topics so please bear with me as we get started. I hope you’ll find something involved that makes you exclaim something to the effect of “that’s really useful! A task runner is, at its simplest, a “worker” that peforms tasks.

The Right Tool for the Job  

By Eric McCormick | 11/5/15, 11:48 AM | - | Added by John Oldenburger

Most people that know me know that I have a certain take on development for Domino/XPages. This isn’t a bad thing, in fact I think it points to the great flexibility of the XPages runtime with which I spend most of my day job working.