Posts on category Coding
Website or App? Yes! The hacky guide to building sites with Expo Router
One of the annoying little side quests of shipping an app is that Google occasionally forces you to become a website owner too. Back when I first wrote about Mu…
Musclog: Redesign nutrition tracking and why your fitness app subscription is a scam
Picture this: you're in the gym. You're between sets. You're sweating. You have about 90 seconds before you need to grab the bar again, and you're standing ther…
Why the 7700 calorie rule is broken (and how I fixed it in my app)
Illustration of a person weighing food on a scale next to a large calorie equation I thought I had this figured out back in 2023. I built a Node.js script that…
I built a retro RPG game shop extension for my Magento 2 store
My brand-new project (or side-gig?), Zenkai Zone, had grown into a solid e-commerce site, but let's face it - just using the plain Magento 2 template is a bit m…
Creating a Magento 2 extension to automate product description
The life of a store manager in the eCommerce world isn't always glamorous. You might dream of big product launches and tons of revenue, but most of the time you…
Sharing encrypted Laravel cookies with Next.js
I often have friends asking me, "Pablo, how do you manage to stay so calm and collected in the face of complex technical challenges?" Well, the truth is, I don'…
Musclog: Leveraging my React.js experience to build a React Native App
Musclog illustration I constantly have that feeling of "You become the very thing you swore to destroy" due to the amount of time I've been dedicating to bodybu…
Tracking my working hours on personal projects using Node.js
illustration of how it feels to work with foss As a developer fully committed (pun intended, and not the only one) in FOSS side projects, I often lose track of…
Transforming manga pages for lazy western readers
Reading manga as a Western reader can feel a bit like debugging assembly code, frustrating, and with a high risk of getting it all wrong. So, my fellow manga mi…
Creating Instagram Reels coding tutorials automatically with OpenAI's GPT
After creating a Node.js script to automatically post Instagram Reels and one to automatically generate thumbnails for a Instagram Reels, what comes next? Autom…
How to automatically create thumbnails for your videos with Node.js
Just last week I posted about how to upload reels to Instagram using Node.js, and in the code it was possible to upload a cover image for the video too, but I d…
Posting Instagram Reels using Node.js and the art of overcoming limitations
Hey guys! It's hard to be a geek these days, so many events are exclusive to media people and influencers - even E3 was a trade-only show for many years. So let…
My blog now has Stories, and I'm not sure why
'Stories' are everywhere on social media these days, and I found myself thinking - does my blog really need Stories? The answer, of course, is a resounding 'fuc…
Using Google Fitness API to calculate my TDEE and more
If you want to lose some weight or build muscle, it's all about knowing how many calories you burn in a day, which is called your Total Daily Energy Expenditure…
Creating Rest API endpoints to my Gatsby blog
Gatsby is a popular static site generator that is built on React, and it's the one that I use to create this blog. It has a plugin system that makes it pretty e…
Creating a Startup with GitHub Actions and Google Forms
The housing market in Amsterdam is crazy, so crazy that universities are telling students to not come to Amsterdam unless they already have a place to live here…
How to get the Redux State in a React 18 production build via the browser's console
A few months ago I wrote a blog post about how to get the Redux State in production, but with the recent release of React 18, that code doesn't work anymore. Le…
Adding a copy button to code snippets on Gatsby: The lazy way
I constantly write about code and share code snippets in my blog posts and copy-pasting code is an essential skill for software engineers, and since selecting a…
How Webpack handles dynamic imports with variable paths
Webpack is the most popular module bundler for JavaScript, it's a tool for bundling modules together into a single file and more. One thing that always bugged m…
Using Node.js and GitHub Action to find a house on Funda.nl
If you want to rent or buy a house in the Netherlands, you better brace yourself because it is no easy task, especially if you're looking in Amsterdam. Applying…
How to get the Redux State in production via the browser's console
EDIT: This only works for React 17 or lower, for React 18 check this blog post. Sometimes you want to debug the Redux State from your application on production,…
Create videos from code snippets with this Node.js script
When I was working on my Game Devlog videos, I wondered if there was any way to automatically transform my code snippets into a video, so I could add them to my…
How to import Gatsby posts into Medium with Gist code snippets
Medium is a great platform to share your blog posts with a wider audience, but it is a bit annoying that to have code snippets you need to create a GitHub Gist…
I made a top-down game version of my blog with Phaser and React
Yes, that's right, there is now a game version of this website. Tired of clicking around boring pages and reading stuff? What about dive into a journey of a top…
How to create a top-down RPG Maker like game with Phaser JS and React
My first experience in "programming" started in 2002, when I was making games with RPG Maker, when I learned what a variable, data persistence, and loops were.…
Creating a dialog box with React for a Phaser game
Phaser works by rendering pixels inside a canvas element in the DOM, and it's great, but one of the great features of web development is the power of the DOM an…
Creating a Matrix Source-Code effect background for my website with React
To celebrate the release of the Matrix 4 trailer, I want to add a Matrix Source-Code effect background to this website, which is already deployed, and you can t…
How to create an offline search page with Gatsby
When making a JAMStack website, some compromises need to be made, but searching is not one of them, thanks to JavaScript libraries like flexsearch and lunr.js.…
Building a dynamic form from a JSON schema
Around 2 months ago, Gatsby v3 was released, and I was already super hyped to upgrade this blog to v3 and start using incremental builds, but "sadly" this blog…
Using GitHub Actions to deploy my blog into different domains
Today I decided to deploy my blog to my GitHub Pages address, blopa.github.io, in addition to my normal pablo.gg deploy, but how can I do that? First I created…
How to calculate the annual inflation in Brazil using JavaScript
Today I needed to know the accumulated inflation of the last year for Brazil for a project I am working on, information that can be easily accessed on the IBGE…
How to create a JSON download link using HTML only
This week I was working on my project Resume Builder and I wanted to be able to create a button that downloads a JSON without using JavaScript. The only way I k…
I pay $0.00 in hosting for this website
When I was in college, web development wasn't a major part of programming as it is these days, I didn't have a single class on the web, and now I work with it e…
How an open source project landed me a job abroad
It's normal for people in the tech industry to move around the globe in search of better jobs, or even just move around for the sake of moving around, the popul…