Ping from Morocco

Context One of the features I had in mind for moroccanslang.com was the ability to display definition previews when shared on social media. That, and SEO, is the reason why I opted for server-side rendering for this project. NextJS was making the headlines at the time, and I decided to give it a shot. This was purely hype-driven and if I were pressed for time, I would have gone with Angular since I had more experience with SSR under Angular Universal . But it was an interesting learning experience nonetheless. For the deployment, I went with Vercel since it goes hand in hand with NextJS. The backend, written in Django, was also deployed on Vercel. Django on Vercel was unorthodox to say the least. It came with its fair share of headaches, but I'll have to address those in another article. Implementation Social sharing previews rely on a protocol called Open Graph . It allows you to define metatags that social network robots will read in order to display "rich objects...

Given the state that the world is in right now, many companies, mine included , offered their employees the option of working from home. I decided to jump on the "working from home" bandwagon and write an entry describing how I personally managed it. Hardware A few days before the state of emergency took effect, I bought an HP monitor, a Logitech keyboard and the cheapest mouse I could find. With this, I set up an impromptu workstation for the days to come. I chose this monitor because it supports both HDMI and Display Port. I use the former with my work issued laptop and the latter with my own Thinkpad. The choice of keyboard was driven by the lack of an alternative. Most of the keyboards I was shown looked like cheap knockoffs of popular brands. As for the mouse, I picked the cheapest one because I'm not a heavy mouse user, and I figured any mouse would do the trick. I regretted this decision when I found out that the mouse sometimes releases mid-click, which resul...