Author: Nicholas Harris

Something that’s commonly used by Scrum teams are User Stories. They’re used as a way to keep development concentrated on solving an issue rather than developing a feature. Often times they result in the same things. For example, a user may want an extra setting in a script for automatically making links in an article…Read More

My mom needed 250 discount codes created to go onto product labels as a bonus gift, and they all needed to be unique. She uses Shopify for her online store, and uses Shopify’s product discount codes. It would’ve taken forever to manually generate each code, as each one had to be unique and required some…Read More

Both as a resource moderator for SpigotMC and working for a business that runs website SEO scans, I’ve found that there are a lot of repetitive tasks. Most of these involve filling out details in a form. For example, about 75% of the reports on resources for Spigot plugins were “invalid”. Either they were making…Read More

I was recently taken on for a startup that specialized in finding SEO related issues in WordPress blogs, and they had a very interesting setup. Google Spreadsheets allows for fairly complicated scripting, with a language based around JavaScript. You can create buttons, make HTTP requests, and generate data with it, among other things. The startup…Read More

When working with other people on a Git repository, you’ll eventually encounter merge conflicts. This happens when two people attempt to make modifications to the repository, causing one to be pushed while the other must either replace the changes made by the first or somehow merged. The easiest way to avoid merge conflicts is to…Read More

Something that’s in demand for every project being developed is configurability. These days, everything needs to be changeable. Languages, layouts, themes, colors, everything. In some projects, though, simply having a config file to load key values from is not enough. Sometimes people want to add simple scripts to their system, usually for automation.In the project…Read More

When writing Spigot plugins for clients, it was common for them to request for everything to be configurable. Usually this was just the messages sent to players, in case they wanted to tweak something to be more consistent with other messages or change the language. Usually, this led to quite a lot of code being written…Read More

Another of the features I wanted to improve for my Bittrex project was to create a better system for sending requests to the HTTP API servers. Because of their rate limit, I couldn’t just send requests for data whenever I needed it. Ideally, I want to get market ticks every minute as that’s when they…Read More

Most APIs for online applications (Facebook, Twitter, Shipstation, etc) are in the form of an HTTP API. An HTTP endpoint is an online URL you can make requests to, similarly to how a browser would make requests to a normal website. The HTTP server would take requests with parameters and return relevant data. For example,…Read More

The largest aspect of my previous Bittrex trading program was how the program collected market data. Market data was collected in “ticks”, or “candlestick”. Each tick was period of time that it covered, in varying lengths. For example, a tick length might be an hour. The tick for that specific hour in time would contain…Read More