On small scale projects hosted on Vercel, it can be useful to have a fixed URL that always points to the latest preview deployment. One can easily achieve this - at no cost! - using GitHub Actions’ repository_dispatch events emitted by Vercel, as well as the Vercel CLI, to create a free Vercel custom domain upon successful deployment to your Preview environment.

Who doesn’t want shiny badges to show off their coverage stats on their brand new side project? I, for one, did - but I didn’t want to rely on a third-party badge service, nor did I want to setup, like some suggest online, GitHub Pages on my repo for this sole goal. But, with SVG and a bit of GitHub Actions magic, neither of these is needed!

I recently tried my hand at Node.js backend development after over 6 years of Sping Boot work experience. I was looking to reproduce a familiar behavior: the injection of a local, temporary database into my integration tests for my Prisma ORM layer to interact with. I couldn’t find an out-of-the-box solution for this, but eventually found a way, using Jest mocks and SQLite - here’s how.

In April 2025, I quit my job for personal relocation purposes, and remained unemployed until September 2025. I had never gone through such a gap before, but I had a plan to keep busy, and I mostly stuck to it. In the end, my day-to-day didn’t turn out much different from what it was in my previous job. In this post, I’ll go over the things I did.

One summer, I developed a small Node.js API using Express. It turned out useful and I wanted to host it for my personal usage. I turned to Vercel, and struggled for a while to get my Express API running on there. In this post, I go over how I eventually managed, as well as a few considerations that are worth keeping in mind when choosing Vercel for this use case.

A (seemingly) undocumented feature of CloudWatch’s GetLogEvents operation is that, if you don’t set a startTime in your command request, you will potentially NOT start reading the log events of your LogStream from the start.

This doesn’t seem too silly to me, given the indexing issues that come with such systems (that are designed to handle huge amount of data). What seems silly to me, though, is to not obviously document this behavior.

If you find yourself not retrieving all logs from a LogStream using the GetLogEvents command (e.g. via a GetLogEventsCommand when using the AWS JavaScript SDK), you should set the startTime parameter in the request body of your GetLogEventsCommand. I personally set it to the timestamp of the first event of the stream (which you can find the firstEventTimestamp field of a LogStream).

I launched Lys back in late 2019 as a Twitter bot to post reminders about Eurovision national selection TV shows from all over Europe. Five years later, it weathered a Twitter (now X) API mess, went through a well needed refactoring, got a brand-new management app, and grew in scope to offer its services on 2 additional platforms and a very simple web page - all while still costing absolutely nothing in hosting. Let’s revisit the thing, and discuss the various tips and tricks in use to keep it running aux frais de la princesse Bezos.

How many blog posts does it take for something to qualify as an obsession? Asking for a friend. This is most likely the last post on the topic though! So please bear with me as I take you through my journey to create a Eurovision 2021 logo generator. Or don’t, you know, who am I to force you.

Uh oh. Déjà vu. Am I seeing double? Isn’t there a post with the exact same title a little further down? Well, almost! I indeed wrote a post titled “Recreating the 2020 Eurovision logo using CSS” a few months ago which was about, well, recreating the 2020 Eurovision logo with CSS. Following the cancellation of the contest and the rescheduling of an ESC in Rotterdam, the team decided to rework the logo a little bit. Which means of course that I had to take care of that one as well.

In October 2019 I launched Lys, a simple Twitter bot made to remind its followers of any Eurovision selection show taking place anywhere in Europe on a daily basis. I’ll give it to you, it really isn’t anything groundbreaking, but there’s more to it than just a script that runs twice a day, so I figured I’d take the time to explain how it all actually works.

(Yes, I’m sneakily backdating this article as it’s not exactly new, although rewritten especially for this new lil cosy blog)

The visual theme is what makes each Eurovision different and I’m always super curious to see what the next creative team is going to come up with. I was at first unsure about the 2020 (and as we now know, 2021) logo, but it quickly grew on me and that’s most likely because of what it represents. See, it’s not just a logo, it’s data. And if there’s one thing I like more than design, it’s a beautifully crafted data vizualization.