Everywhere I look, people are talking about COVID-19. Rightly so, it’s the most important event in years. Highly contagious illness are not new, and it’s not a thing of the past. In 2002, an outbreak of another coronavirus (SARS-CoV) with its origins in China also shook the world. At first, the rest of the world expected COVID-19 to stay contained, just like the previous SARS-CoV outbreak that remained largely out-of-mind for many people. The fact that COVID-19 is a much more efficient virus than SARS-CoV in its spread means that the measures taken to stop SARS-CoV were not sufficient this t ..read more

I’ve done a lot of searching, and I think I found something – and it’s how to find magic. To make you understand, I need to tell a story. See, the world has thousands of beaches. Beautiful views. Amazing temples to its patheon of pantheons of gods. Iconic monuments. Places of rememberance of various horrors. I still remember being in Morocco, my first big trip as an adult. The minarets with their calls to prayer hovering over the city, its melody lifting the spirit. The winding alleys of the ancient medinas, so easily leading to the unusual feeling of being lost in a maze of mutual chaotic d ..read more

The warm, hard-falling rain had passed, and the shy sun peeked once again from behind a small spattering of clouds. In the distance near the vanishing point of the horizon, bright stabs of lightning gracefully throbbed in the sky with the frequency of a slow pulse. This is the beginning of the rain season on Cambodia’s coast. One just has to accept that the warm downpour will soak through clothes in under a minute, its welcome droplets washing away the gradual sweat from your slow-baking body with its cooling comfort. The characteristic red mud on the dirt roads, now wet with the rain will be ..read more

I have neglected writing for a while, but it’s time to check in and talk. I’d like to apologise – we’ve been in Phnom Penh, Cambodia now for three months and I haven’t written this sooner. But it has been three months. Three months full of highs and lows. Phnom Penh itself is the centre of Cambodia, situated on the meeting of three rivers – the mighty Mekong flowing from Tibet via China and Lao, its tributary the Bassac, and the Tonlé Sap. Last night, the heavens opened up and the long awaited rains finally came, relieving themselves in the night sky amid bombastic displays of lightning. To ..read more

We left Amsterdam on the 15th of December, and today is the 28th. Only 16 days ago, my friends and colleagues in Netherlands threw me a going away party where we toured the Amsterdam Light Festival by boat and ate amazing Alegrian food near Westergasfabriek. That is two weeks now that we’ve been homeless and two weeks before we arrive in our first semi-permanent residence in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. So where have we been? We have been hiding out in Malta, a small group of islands situated between The Maghreb and Sicily, in more ways than just geography. The islands have been ruled at one time or ..read more

My train was approaching Leiden Central Station as the engulfing blackness of the South Holland countryside gave way to the lights of the town. The trees and straight-banked irrigation canals punctuated the farmlands, green by day, black and shapeless by the night’s eye behind me – broken up by the occasional middle-of-nowhere village. The red brick of the buildings, with accents of solid colours occupying the spaces between those bricks in variations of rectangles, stretched on both sides of the tracks as the empty streets and squares rested after a day’s use. Quiet, alone, basking in the nig ..read more

Various ORMs (like Rails’ ActiveRecord, Sequelize, etc) offer you the option of adding timestamps for the moment a record is created and updated. The created stamp is easy to do by simply giving it a default value of NOW(), but an updated_at stamp needs to change every time the row does. But in a recent quest to simplify my projects, I needed an updated_at stamp but did not want to go through the trouble of manually writing it on every update. So I settled on doing the following in my Postgres database: CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION updated_at_restamp_column() RETURNS TRIGGER AS $$ BEGIN ..read more

These days in the age of <script> tags getting the async and defer attributes, you might want to include a .js file on your site, and then use its methods inline or in another script file. Take this snippet for example: <html> <head> <script src="myscript.js" deferred></script> </head> <body> <script> ObjectFromScript.init({ apiKey: 'key' }); </script> </body> </html> You don’t want to run into the problem where your .init() function is called before the ObjectFromScript is available! Well, there’s a perfe ..read more

Working for one client, I had to write a widget that would JustWork™ in clients’ websites, adapting to their colour schemes and not interfering in their own scripts. It’s actually not that hard when you identify the requirements of what you’re doing! I thought I’d share my learnings with the community. 1. You don’t need to use an <iframe> anymore Iframes have been around for a long time, and many people will advise you to use these to create a universal widget due to the fact that it basically incapsulates your content within your own page. While this is true, and Iframes may be the an ..read more