OSX: Inkscape not working with multiple monitors

I recently noticed that under OSX Inkscape behaves strangely with multiple monitors. I thought I'd broken the installation as when launching Inkscape it opened and then the window immediately disappears. Fortunately there's a bug that's been filed here: XQuartz on OS X 10.9 and later: limited support for multi-monitor…

Python: testing beyond exceptions

Recently working on some code I was doing some basic tests that checked for an exception being raised. The tests looked like this: def test_user_identification_is_valid_option(self): with self.assertRaises(ValueError): example_seller(products=[ 'id': 'hai', 'description': 'a description', 'recurrence': None, 'user_identification': True, }]) def test_…

Back to the future: ES6 + React

I've just recently finished shaving about a billion yaks * to convert a React app over to use ES6 modules and classes so we can start living in the future that is ES6 with a sprinkling of ES7. * Might not be true Transpiling back to the present We're using babel via…

Running tests on Sauce Labs via Travis

For the Payments Team's front-end projects we've just landed support for running the front-end unit tests using Sauce Labs. About Sauce Labs In case you've never heard of Sauce Labs (unlikely!) they provide access to a multitude of browser/platform combinations via vms so you can run your automated test…

SVG credit-card provider icons

Recently I've been working on a UI for credit-card payments. As part of this we needed some credit-card icons to show the card type as the user types in the number to the input field. In looking for existing iconography I either couldn't find exactly what I was looking for,…

Tips for building a dev-env with docker

Using docker and docker-compose to run a development environment can be a good way to have all your services connected and running together. I'm going to assume you've got a basic understanding of docker and how it works if not there's a good overview of what docker is here. We're…

JS: Creating instances without new

During a code review recently I was looking at some code that was using the new keyword to create an instance e.g: var inst = new MyConstructor(); The context object when new isn't used The code contained a safeguard to bail if the new keyword wasn't used. Which is a…