Another Dev's Two Cents

Nish Tahir

Any opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer, or anyone else.

📍 The Milky Way Galaxy 🌌 https://nishtahir.com

Automating form input with Selenium IDE

A form is the most common means of collecting user information on the internet. When implemented well, they can be simple to use particularly when the requested data is short and easy to enter. More complex data is usually better collected through other means such as structured file imports. However,

How to create a macOS Monterey Installation ISO image

The macOS ecosystem loves *.dmg volumes as its main container format. However, *.iso can sometimes be the easiest to work with if you are exploring virtualization. Having a macOS installation image can be pretty handy to have in your toolbox. There are some images floating around on the internet, however,

The dangers of pretty much done

Shipping products at scale is complicated. Work items frequently change hands often across different teams and levels of an organization. Status updates travel up and down the chain of management via a classic game of telephone presenting a lot of opportunities for miscommunication and misalignment. One particular area of misalignment

The cost of Heroes on your software team

Over the years, I've seen all sorts of organizational and systemic problems within organizations that actively cause them to work against themselves. These ultimately manifest as missed deadlines and, unmet goals while incurring additional costs. One such issue I see fairly often is the Hero problem. I consider Heroes to

How to get IDEA to detect openJDKs installed with brew

I recently went through a Homebrew [https://brew.sh/] (brew) Open JDK 11 and IntelliJ IDEA installation on a new Macbook Pro. $ brew install openjdk@11 $ brew install intellij-idea-ce However, I noticed that IntelliJ did not auto-detect the Java installation when creating new projects. Selecting the Project SDK dropdown did

Interacting with WebAssembly memory

One of the most interesting features of WebAssembly is its memory model. Despite providing a system that allows for direct access and control of raw bytes, it does this in a way that offers more safety than one would typically expect out of low-level environments like C/C++. WASM memory

Embedded WebAssembly on a D1 Mini with WASM3

With WebAssembly (WASM) emerging outside the browser, several options for embedded WASM have begun to mature. One such platform is WASM3 [https://github.com/wasm3/wasm3]. It positions itself as "The fastest WebAssembly interpreter, and the most universal runtime" with cross-platform support across a range of architectures and operating systems.

Making games on WASM4 with Rust

WASM4 is a virtual game console that's very reminiscent of the Pico8 [https://www.lexaloffle.com/pico-8.php] system. It's an idealized system with a display format, sound system, and controller inputs similar to retro gaming consoles without the inconvenience of physical hardware. Games are distributed as self-contained WebAssembly (WASM)

Let's explore code signing with WebAssembly

💡If you're just looking to sign your binaries, I recommend using a tool that has been validated and tested by the community. This blog post aims to cover the process of code signing using WASM as a medium and may not cover every use case. A few I found while

The WebAssembly Text Format

While WebAssembly's primary distribution format is a binary file, the spec describes a textual representation called the WebAssembly Text Format [https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/WebAssembly/Understanding_the_text_format] [1] or WAT for short. While WASM binary files are designed to be as small and compact as possible