TL;DR

This article describes a way to gradually migrate shared Mithril components from version 0.2 to 1.x.

Documentation

Before we start, I have to say that Mithril has a great migration page which you should definitely check out before reading this article. There is even a tool named mithril-codemods which will automatically convert your code.

Context

Here is the context: you’ve written multiple applications with Mithril 0.2 and you have extracted some of your components as npm modules so that they can be shared among your projects. You are now starting a new project and you’d like to use Mithril 1.x. The question is: how do you structure your shared components so that they can be used by your new application written with Mithril 1.x and your other applications written with Mithril 0.2 ?

Until a few days ago, I was using Ghost as a blogging platform. While the project is great, maintaining it is not so great: you have to (sometimes) update Node.js, install new dependencies, update the database, … While all these tasks are quite easy, you have to do it every time there is a new release, which is quite cumbersome for a simple blog like this one.

Recently, I’ve been looking for an alternative, and quickly found static site generators. There are quite a lot of them (there is even a dedicated website to choose from). I wanted something that was relatively easy to install and decided to test Hugo which corresponded to my needs. Being written in Go, starting Hugo is really fast (I’ve worked with Node.js tools for the past years and the difference is quite huge).

Intro

What does it look like to develop a modern desktop application ? Traditionnaly, people think there are only 2 ways to do it :

• using proven technologies like Java or C#, you build a native application which integrates greatly with your operating system (like Word or Excel)
• using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript, you create a web application that runs inside a web browser (like Gmail or Facebook)

Well, there is actually a third approach : building native application using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

Part of our job as a developer is to learn new programming languages. But why ? Can’t we just stick with a small number of languages and use our precious time to do something else ? It turns out that learning new languages means learning new paradigms, new ways of doing things, and is in fact quite fun. Once you know the basic concepts, it’s fairly easy to learn a new one.

There we are, my blog is finally up and running and it’s time to write the first article! I’ve long wanted to start a blog but declined to do so until now: lack of time.

Before diving in, I would like to explain how I came here. The lack of time was not the only reason not to start blogging. I wanted to host the blog on a machine I could play with: install, configure, test, break, … Enter Amazon EC2: a cheap solution to have a box in the cloud. I decided to install Debian on it and followed the amazing articles at arstechnica entitled Web Served and I have now a fresh instance of the Ghost blogging platform in front of me !