tech/webdev magazine

August 31, 2017

Write in Google Docs, Publish in WordPress. Here’s how.

Thursday, August 31, 2017 Teklinks

Google Docs is the go-to document creation tool for both teams and individuals. It offers advanced collaboration and editing tools for free and without any limitations. However, when it comes to moving the document from Google Docs to your WordPress website, it doesn’t play very well.

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Understanding Scope in JavaScript

Thursday, August 31, 2017 Teklinks

Scope is an important, yet ambiguous concept in JavaScript. Used correctly, it allows you to leverage good design patterns and helps you avoid bad side effects. In this article, we will dissect the different types of scope in JavaScript and how they work deep down in order to write better code.

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React Crash Course for Beginners, Part 1

Thursday, August 31, 2017 Teklinks

In this tutorial series we'll dive right into using React as we build a fully working app to display a gallery of movies. Learning how to build an app from scratch is a great opportunity to practise using all the key features of React whilst levelling up your development skills.

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Asynchronous Chat With Rails and ActionCable

Thursday, August 31, 2017 Teklinks

Rails 5 has introduced many new cool features and ActionCable is probably the most anticipated one. To put it simply, ActionCable is a framework for real-time configuration over web sockets.

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August 30, 2017

Set Up a React Environment, Part 4

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Teklinks

React has been known in the past for being difficult to get started creating apps, as you really had to understand how to configure build tools manually. This is even before you write a single line of React code.

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The anatomy of a Bootstrap dashboard that earns $1,000s each month

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Teklinks

We at Creative Tim have always wanted to deliver great tools to all the web developers who are using our products. If you want to read more about how we’ve built our business and what is our drive, you can check this article: Growing a side project into a $17,000 month business.

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Is Success Down To The Quality Of Your Work?

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Teklinks

One of the biggest fallacies of our industry is that good work speaks for itself. It is a self-delusional lie that those with a good reputation tell themselves to explain their success. I will let you in on a secret; I am not that amazing at my job. Don’t get me wrong; I am good.

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Set Up a React Environment, Part 3

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Teklinks

Throughout the rest of this tutorial series, we'll focus on setting up React locally. The first of these approaches is similar to CodePen, where the React scripts were inserted dynamically into your HTML file, before being rendered in the output window.

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JavaScript Scope and Closures

Wednesday, August 30, 2017 Teklinks

Scopes and closures are important in JavaScript. But, they were confusing for me when I first started. Here's an explanation of scopes and closures to help you understand what they are. Let's start with scopes.

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August 29, 2017

Set Up a React Environment, Part 2

Tuesday, August 29, 2017 Teklinks

If you are new to React then, understandably, you just want to get coding, and play around with some simple components to see how React works. You really don't want to have to wade through a lengthy setup process in the first instance.

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Set Up a React Environment, Part 1

Tuesday, August 29, 2017 Teklinks

React is a JavaScript library for building user interfaces (UI). It's maintained and developed by Facebook, and is one of the most popular tools for creating web apps today. However, it's had a bit of a reputation for not being very user friendly to set up a React app, particularly for beginners.

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Implementing GraphQL Using Apollo On an Express Server

Tuesday, August 29, 2017 Teklinks

GraphQL is a data query language for APIs and runtime, a specification that defines a communication protocol between a client and server. At its core, GraphQL enables flexible, client-driven application development in a strongly typed environment.

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August 28, 2017

CSS Architecture and the Three Pillars of Maintainable CSS

Monday, August 28, 2017 Teklinks

If you have ever inherited bad CSS with the obligation of maintaining it, you might have felt some empathy towards others who would maintain your code in the future. In extreme cases, developers have no other choice, but to completely rewrite the CSS of an application.

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Struggling to Find Great Senior JavaScript Developers? Mentorship is the Answer

Monday, August 28, 2017 Teklinks

The more I study the impact of mentorship on the teams we work with, the more I’m blown away by the magnitude of change it produces. The cost of mentorship increases on a linear scale with time, but the impact of mentorship increases on an exponential scale, with compounding productivity returns orders-of-magnitude greater than the time and money invested.

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Explaining React's license

Monday, August 28, 2017 Teklinks

A few weeks ago, the Apache Software Foundation (the ASF) made a decision to list the BSD + Patents license as a Category-X license. This move affects users of much of Facebook's open source software, but especially the popular React project and the constellation of projects around it.

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A crash course on testing with Node.js

Monday, August 28, 2017 Teklinks

JavaScript is a beautiful language. You must believe I’m crazy. Maybe you’re crazy for agreeing with me. But why would I say something like this? As a language, JavaScript gives you no support whatsoever.

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Firebase: 5 way-too-common misconceptions

Monday, August 28, 2017 Teklinks

I’ve been reading a lot of online commentary recently about Firebase. Mostly — it must be pointed out — written by developers who hate Firebase. You can almost hear the little veins standing out on their foreheads.

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August 27, 2017

Preloading ngrx/store with Route Guards

Sunday, August 27, 2017 Teklinks

Using ngrx/store (and some love for ngrx/effects) is definitely a great step for my productivity when managing state in Angular, and I want to share a small setup that’ll allow you to preload data as normal with a Route Guard.

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How to Use Tor With a VPN: Tutorial to Install IPVanish

Sunday, August 27, 2017 Teklinks

Tor is an anonymity network that spans the globe and works to ensure that its users are protected from censorship, detection and invasion of privacy. Its current name is derived from “The Onion Router”, which was its original project name.

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UP: deploy serverless apps in seconds

Sunday, August 27, 2017 Teklinks

Last year I wrote Blueprints for Up, describing how most of the building blocks are available to create a great serverless experience on AWS with minimal effort. This post talks about the initial alpha release of Up.

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How Machines Learn: A Practical Guide

Sunday, August 27, 2017 Teklinks

You may have heard about machine learning from interesting applications like spam filtering, optical character recognition, and computer vision. Getting started with machine learning is long process that involves going through several resources.

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How do you separate components?

Sunday, August 27, 2017 Teklinks

There is nothing inherently wrong with having large components in a React app. In fact, for stateful components, it is absolutely expected that they’ll have a bit of size. The thing about state is that it generally doesn’t decompose very well.

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August 26, 2017

5 laws every developer should know

Saturday, August 26, 2017 Teklinks

Laws - or principles - can give us guidance and teach us lessons from our peers’ mistakes. In this article, I will introduce you to five laws I always have in the back of my mind when designing or implementing a software.

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10 JavaScript concepts you need to know for interviews

Saturday, August 26, 2017 Teklinks

There are thousands of people learning JavaScript and web development in the hopes of getting a job. Often, self-learning leaves gaps in people’s understanding of the JavaScript language itself. It’s actually surprising how little of the language is needed to make complex web pages.

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Create Advanced Components in Angular

Saturday, August 26, 2017 Teklinks

In this article, we are going to learn how to create a dynamic component that uses ng-content. We are going to learn advanced techniques like how to create an injector and passing TemplateRef or a Component as content. To demonstrate all this, we will create a tooltip.

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August 25, 2017

Docker Swarm vs Kubernetes: Pros and Cons

Friday, August 25, 2017 Teklinks

Have you ever found yourself stuck choosing between Docker vs. Kubernetes? Well, if you did, then you are not the only one. Both of them are excellent container services, and the choice heavily depends upon your requirements or your team.

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Converting from Speech to Text with JavaScript

Friday, August 25, 2017 Teklinks

In this tutorial we are going to experiment with the Web Speech API. It's a very powerful browser interface that allows you to record human speech and convert it into text. We will also use it to do the opposite - reading out strings in a human-like voice. Let's jump right in!

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August 24, 2017

My Docker Cheat Sheet

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

I’ve been using Docker for years now, in my previous professional experiences and for my company (eralabs.io) customers and I wanted to share my knowledge, and that’s why I started Painless Docker Course.

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How Do I Download an Entire Website for Offline Reading?

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

Even though WiFi is everywhere these days, you will find yourself without it from time to time. And when you do, there may be certain websites you wish you could access while offline — perhaps for research, entertainment, or posterity.

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Implementing Push Notifications: Setting Up & Firebase

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

You know those the little notification windows that pop up in the top right (Mac) or bottom right (Windows) corner when, for example, a new article on our favorite blog or a new video on YouTube was uploaded? Those are push notifications.

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YOLO: Real-Time Object Detection

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

You only look once (YOLO) is a state-of-the-art, real-time object detection system. On a Titan X it processes images at 40-90 FPS and has a mAP on VOC 2007 of 78.6% and a mAP of 48.1% on COCO test-dev. Prior detection systems repurpose classifiers or localizers to perform detection.

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Using Chart.js in Angular With ng2-charts

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

Chart.js is a popular JavaScript charting library and ng2-charts is a wrapper for Angular 2+ that makes it easy to integrate Chart.js in Angular. Let’s go over the basic usage. This sets the base type of the chart. The value can be pie, doughnut, bar, line, polarArea, radar or horizontalBar.

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Angular TDD – Creating a component

Thursday, August 24, 2017 Teklinks

In this blogpost, I will explain how to create an Angular component using TDD and show how it affects the code coverage report. This blogpost assumes the following has been installed on your machine.

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August 23, 2017

I built a chatbot in 2 hours and this is what I learned

Wednesday, August 23, 2017 Teklinks

We spend about 5 hours on our smartphones every day as per this study from Flurry. Not only is this statistic surprising in its own right, about 65% of this time is spent on communication related activities like social media, texting, emailing and phone calls. That’s 3 hours and 15 minutes. Every.

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Building a RESTful API With Koa and Postgres

Wednesday, August 23, 2017 Teklinks

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to develop a RESTful API with Koa 2 and Postgres. You’ll also be taking advantage of async/await functions, from ES2017, and test driven development (TDD). This tutorial requires Node v7.6.0 or greater.

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