teklinks

tech/webdev magazine

André Simões

André Simões
Web Developer

July 31, 2018

Tips for balancing web fonts & page load

Tuesday, July 31, 2018 Teklinks

WebPageTest is the best free tool for profiling page load. It allows you to throttle connections and use real mobile devices. For this study, we'll use the "Easy" profile, which is a slow 3G connection. The results WebPageTest provides are comprehensive but sometimes hard to understand.

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How to Turn a TV Into a Retro Gaming System With Raspberry Pi Zero

Tuesday, July 31, 2018 Teklinks

The Raspberry Pi Zero, a compact and remarkably cheap (just $5) iteration of the popular mini-computer, has proven to be even more versatile than its predecessors. In this tutorial, we’re going to take a common Raspberry Pi project—converting an old TV into a retro gaming console—and walk through it step by step, giving you all you need to build your own Raspberry Pi Zero retro gaming station as simply as possible.

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July 30, 2018

8 Effective Design Tips for Offline Applications

Monday, July 30, 2018 Teklinks

With the seeming massive adoption of web applications, design systems to support this adoption get better. While the internet is abound in certain areas, connectivity could be limited or non-existent in other areas or cases, this notion has influenced the design of applications on both web and mobile platforms.

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Page Lifecycle API

Monday, July 30, 2018 Teklinks

Modern browsers today will sometimes suspend pages or discard them entirely when system resources are constrained. In the future, browsers want to do this proactively, so they consume less power and memory.

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July 29, 2018

Google Flutter From Scratch: Building Apps With Widgets

Sunday, July 29, 2018 Teklinks

Flutter is fast becoming one of the most popular frameworks for developing cross-platform mobile apps. Most Android and iOS developers today are starting to agree that it is a faster and more future-proof alternative to other cross-platform frameworks such as React Native and NativeScript.

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July 26, 2018

July 25, 2018

It Costs $50k to Hire a Software Engineer

Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Teklinks

Anyone in tech has probably heard that it’s hard to hire good software engineers; but folks might not realize just how expensive it can be. Simple back-of-the-envelope math shows that it can easily cost $50,000 to recruit someone and bring them up to speed.

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Redux vs. The React Context API

Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Teklinks

React 16.3 added a new Context API – new in the sense that the old context API was a behind-the-scenes feature that most people either didn’t know about, or avoided using because the docs said to avoid using it.

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Developer Roadmaps

Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Teklinks

The path to becoming a front-end developer, as looked back upon by anyone who self-identifies that way, is likely a very windy one full of thorn bushes and band websites. Still, documenting a path, even if it's straighter and far cleaner than reality, is an interesting exercise and might just be valuable. Three different writer/developers have taken a crack at it this year and their results have been extraordinarily popular. Let's take a look.

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How to use React Lifecycle Methods

Wednesday, July 25, 2018 Teklinks

React lifecycle methods can be confusing if you don’t know which one to use for your particular use case. Today I’m going to show you, which lifecycle methods exist, and how to use them correctly. React components have several “lifecycle methods” that allow us to execute actions (e.g.

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July 23, 2018

Foundations of Machine Learning

Monday, July 23, 2018 Teklinks

(Aurélien Géron) This is a practical guide to machine learning that corresponds fairly well with the content and level of our course. While most of our homework is about coding ML from scratch with numpy, this book makes heavy use of scikit-learn and TensorFlow.

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Building An Audio Player App with Ionic, Angular, RxJS, and NgRx

Monday, July 23, 2018 Teklinks

TL;DR: In this article, you will learn how to develop a mobile audio player app using Ionic framework and Angular. You will handle audio operations using RxJS and Observables, and you will also explore how you can manage application's state with NgRx. To secure your application, you will use Auth0.

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The Beginners Guide to Service Workers and Angular

Monday, July 23, 2018 Teklinks

A service worker is a small JavaScript program (a worker) that runs in the background and intercepts HTTP requests. It is up to the worker implementation to decide what to do with these requests (and the worker gets access to every HTTP request, not just those made from the application scripts like fetch, but also, for example, the request for the initial index.html file).

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July 22, 2018

The 6 Types of Product Teams You’ll be Working In

Sunday, July 22, 2018 Teklinks

When I get an offer to join a product team, I spend the following days or even weeks considering many different parameters. I see it as a really important decision, which will greatly affect my life. The first thing I usually consider is the vision — the company’s long-term mission.

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The best way to architect your Redux app

Sunday, July 22, 2018 Teklinks

This article is about how to think in Redux. We’ll try to understand how we can utilise this wonderful library to make our application more stable, robust, and maintainable. It is language agnostic, however we will keep our scope to Redux with React.

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Abolish Performance Reviews

Sunday, July 22, 2018 Teklinks

Who doesn’t love the smell of performance reviews in the morning? A smell welcomed by employees and managers alike with joy and delight. An efficient ritual that is fair and definitely motivates everyone to improve. A ritual that no one doubts is worth the investment of time and energy.

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July 20, 2018

The Complete Illustrated Flexbox Tutorial

Friday, July 20, 2018 Teklinks

If you wish to support my work, CSS Visual Dictionary is my book. All diagrams in this tutorial were taken directly from the manuscript! When I started to learn Flexbox, I wanted to see everything it was capable of.

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July 19, 2018

July 18, 2018

Bootstrap Framework — Best Practices

Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Teklinks

At the time of this writing, we’re at Bootstrap v4.1.1 release! In their v5 roadmap, they’re planning to rewrite everything with PostCSS. When that happens, this guide will become deprecated. Until then, enjoy! At this point, I believe that everyone has heard of Bootstrap framework.

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Use TensorFlow AI on Raspberry Pi

Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Teklinks

Google TensorFlow is a powerful open-source software framework used to power AI projects around the globe. TensorFlow is used for machine learning and the creation of neural networks.

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Why 'This' in JavaScript

Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Teklinks

While JavaScript is a fun and powerful language, it can be tricky and requires a proper understanding of its underlying principles to mitigate common errors. In this post, we shall be introducing you to the this keyword, its behaviour and the hard choices behind it.

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Hass.io com HassOS já disponível para o RPI 3B+

Wednesday, July 18, 2018 Teklinks

Quem se tivesse apressado a comprar um Raspberry Pi 3B+ para correr o Home Assistant iria ficar surpreendido pela falta de suporte para esta versão do RPI, mas finalmente eis que o Hass.io chega para ele... e já numa versão baseada no novo HassOS.

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July 16, 2018

Web Architecture 101

Monday, July 16, 2018 Teklinks

The above diagram is a fairly good representation of our architecture at Storyblocks. If you’re not an experienced web developer, you’ll likely find it complicated. The walk through below should make it more approachable before we dive into the details of each component.

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Testing Node.js in 2018

Monday, July 16, 2018 Teklinks

Stream powers feeds for over 300+ million end users. With all of those users relying on our infrastructure, we’re very good about testing everything that gets pushed into production. Our primary codebase is written in Go, with some remaining bits of Python.

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July 15, 2018

Why GraphQL: Advantages, Disadvantages & Alternatives

Sunday, July 15, 2018 Teklinks

I am writing a React GraphQL book which I intend to release the next months. If you are interested in following me on this journey or grabbing a copy of the book as one of its first readers, you can opt-in for receiving updates about it. Feel encouraged to leave me any feedback for improving the content. You can even contribute to it by editing this article on GitHub.

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Useful git commands for everyday use!

Sunday, July 15, 2018 Teklinks

Do you know that questions about git get the most views on StackOverflow? I’ve searched a lot on Google how to execute certain actions with git, and this actually slowed me down a lot. There are some actions that we tend to use a lot, so it’s good to learn them.

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Web Components in 2018

Sunday, July 15, 2018 Teklinks

For many front-end developers, components have become a central concept in their development workflow. Components provide a robust model for architecting and scaling complex applications, allowing for composition from smaller and simpler encapsulated parts.

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React is just JavaScript

Sunday, July 15, 2018 Teklinks

Many people starting out get overwhelmed by all the things happening in the React ecosystem. There’s this idea that what happens in React is magic and that getting started with React is super complicated unless you use tools like create-react-app.

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Web Caching Explained by Buying Milk at the Supermarket

Sunday, July 15, 2018 Teklinks

If you have ever bought milk at the supermarket, then you can understand server-side and browser-side caching. If you are an avid internet user (you probably are), you have benefitted from caching over and over again. But, you might not know when or how it is working its magic behind the scenes.

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July 12, 2018

How to build a real-time editable data table in Vue.js

Thursday, July 12, 2018 Teklinks

In data-driven applications, a data table is used to display data in a tabular format with the ability to edit and delete records in place. When you’re working with Vue, there are different open-sourced components that can be used to easily add a data table to your application.

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July 11, 2018

Microsoft's $399 Surface Go is its smallest tablet yet 

Wednesday, July 11, 2018 Teklinks

It's easy to think that Microsoft has given up on small tablets. In the three years since the release of the Surface 3, its last inexpensive iPad competitor, Microsoft shifted its attention towards larger and more powerful devices like the Surface Pro; the pro-grade Surface Book 2; and the traditional Surface Laptop.

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Clearfix: A Lesson in Web Development Evolution

Wednesday, July 11, 2018 Teklinks

The web community has, for the most part, been a spectacularly open place. As such, a lot of the best development techniques happen right out in the open, on blogs and in forums, evolving as they’re passed around and improved.

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Design Systems at GitHub

Wednesday, July 11, 2018 Teklinks

Design systems have become core to the way we design and build at GitHub. Since 2011 GitHub designers have documented UI patterns and shared common styles. In 2012, CSS and other assets were packaged up into a Ruby Gem for use in GitHub websites — this package was named Primer.

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July 8, 2018

The noob’s guide to CSS Grid

Sunday, July 08, 2018 Teklinks

The days of tables, margin hacks, positioning magic, and the unorthodox ways floats were used to achieved layout desires are finally behind us. We now have the choice to leverage the most powerful layout method to ever arrive in CSS to date; Grid.

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Git commits: An Effective Style Guide

Sunday, July 08, 2018 Teklinks

Git commits are one of the most underrated features of Git. Pause for a moment and think; When was the last time you had to revert your code to an earlier point in time?

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What’s the ROI of UX?

Sunday, July 08, 2018 Teklinks

Design practitioners get asked the value of their work all of the time. They never have a good answer. There are good reasons for this. Often, practitioners don’t actually add value. They tweak colors and shapes of objects on the screen, or they move controls from one side to the other.

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15 HTML element methods you’ve potentially never heard of

Sunday, July 08, 2018 Teklinks

Note to self: write an intro that eases the reader into the article, rather than just jump right in. Let’s discuss the difference between HTML and the DOM. Let’s discuss the difference between HTML and the DOM. A plain old table element is HTML, obviously. You can use it in a file with .html at the end. It’s got a set of attributes that affect the way it looks and behaves.

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Dealing with programmer's burnout

Sunday, July 08, 2018 Teklinks

I have recently come across a post by Recurse Center's fellow alumnus about his burnout and having to quit jobs in the past two years because of his newborn. I think this is an interesting topic that is not being widely talked about enough. How to cope with one's burnout as a programmer.

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