When doing web development on the desktop, you have the benefit of inspection and debugging tools available in modern browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. Inspecting web traffic for page requests and API calls is relatively straightforward. Once you move over to mobile development, you miss a lot of those built-in tools. Luckily there are some good desktop network proxy tools which can make mobile traffic inspection possible again. In this post I’ll walk through setting up an Android 4.x device with Fiddler running on a Windows PC.
Importing table-formatted data from web pages is a very handy feature of Microsoft Excel, and probably not very well known. To demonstrate the steps, I made two short videos covering both Windows and Mac versions of Microsoft Excel…
Keeping track of technical issues, bugs and tasks between companies can be a real hassle. In my current job we switched from emailing Excel spreadsheets to hosted JIRA (OnDemand) which costs only $10/month for up to 10 users.
Curl is a very handy tool for downloading pretty much anything from a URL, and should be in every web developer’s toolkit. However, the sheer number of Curl options can be overwhelming. Here I give a quick summary of the most common options and a few typical examples.
Splunk is an enterprise-grade software tool for collecting and analyzing log files and other data. They have a free version which is great for personal projects or smaller websites. In this blog post I explain how to use Splunk on standard Apache logs to explore your data, and an example of a misbehaving bot that I identified and was able to block.