MomentJS Notes

Install

npm i moment --save
npm i moment-timezone --save

Use

var moment = require('moment-timezone');

Create moments in and out of DST:

var cdt = moment.tz("2015-07-23 08:30", "America/Chicago");
var cst = moment.tz("2015-11-23 08:30", "America/Chicago");

Check that offset from UTC is what you'd expect:

cdt.tz('America/New_York').format()
> '2015-07-23T09:30:00-04:00'
cst.tz('America/New_York').format()
> '2015-11-23T09:30:00-05:00'

Check that zone aware format output is what you'd expect:

cdt.tz('America/New_York').format('HH:mm:ss')
> '09:30:00'
cst.tz('America/New_York').format('HH:mm:ss')
> '09:30:00'

Node Foundation Membership Election

Mikeal Rogers recently posted Nominations for the 2016 Election for individual representation on the Node Foundation board.

I'm putting myself forward and answering the question "Why would you like to represent the individual membership of the foundation?"

Why?

I think that Node.js and the ecosystem around it plays a critical role in our current technology stack. This is going to become more important in the future.

I would like to be able to help shape the success of this platform. One way to do that is to understand what the membership wants and needs to get out of what we have today. More importantly what do they expect from the future. As part of the bridge between membership and the board I will be working to ensure that members' opinions are represented at the leadership level.

Qualifications

Leadership: In the past I've served as a director of engineering for a large IT company managing a team of 35+ managers and developers.

Technical: I have a few open source projects that I manage. I also contribute to open source projects I can improve through pull-requests. My day-to-day work is mostly writing JavaScript against the Node.js platform and system design and architecture.

Questions

I've intentionally kept this brief. I'll answer any questions. If you ask them as comments to this post then we can keep them in one place. Anyone else reading this will be informed.

Babel Cannot read property error of undefined

This is more a reminder to myself about how to solve this error that I've stumbled across a couple of times with Babel 5 & 6.

If you downgrade Babel from 6 to 5 and leave a .babelrc file in your project with a Babel 6 specific setting like:

{
  "presets": ["es2015"]
}

then you might get an error like this:

if (!option) this.log.error("Unknown option: " + alias + "." + key, ReferenceError);

TypeError: Cannot read property 'error' of undefined

The solution is to remove the .babelrc file or remove the Babel 6 specific settings.

Also, if you're using Babel 5 and you require a module from another project that has a .babelrc file which is using Babel 6 and has a Babel 6 setting in it then this will cause the same problem in your Babel 5 project.

Docker and GLIBC_2.14 not found

Hit a problem today when I was using Docker and Docker-compose to run a Node.js app in a CentOS container. I had done an "npm install" locally and then the docker-compose command had setup the container and copied everything over from my Ubuntu workstation.

Problem was that I was using a couple of Node.js modules that used native code. So the Ubuntu compile of those modules was getting copied to the CentOS container and when CentOS was trying to run them it was giving me an error about "GLIBC_2.14 not found" because it hadn't compiled those modules.

I feel that a good practise for almost any Docker setup is to have a .dockerignore file which excludes the "node_modules" folder.

This is what my .dockerignore file looks like:

node_modules/