February 2019 Posts

Discovered something neat with the new version of MySQL and thought it warranted a mention. Storing tree structures in a relational database is a common use case across many different areas of tech. The problem comes when you need to construct a query based on a subset of that tree. But MySQL 8 has some nice new features that makes doing this a breeze.

For the last few years, Gulp has been my go-to task runner for Node projects and, generally, anywhere where I need to build things or run tasks. But the recent release of Gulp 4 broke all of my config files and left me with hours of frustrating rewrites, I decided to see what else might be out there. And, naturally, I landed on Grunt. One thing I liked about Gulp (prior to 4.0) was it’s much looser structure that allowed a lot of freedom in how you structured your file. Grunt seems to be much more structured and opinionated. And sometimes, I don’t like those opinions. A prime example of this is grunt-contrib-watch. When I type grunt watch, I want to run a series of setup tasks first before firing the watcher up. But grunt-contrib-watch squats on the prime real estate that is the watch command. But I wanted to use that command. And there doesn’t seem to be any way to just say “run these arbitrary tasks before starting the watcher.” At least not one that I could find clearly documented. Sure, I could just make my own mywatch or similar command, but I’m picky. I want my command, so we need a way to rename it.