teklinks

tech/webdev magazine

André Simões

André Simões
Web Developer

September 28, 2018

September 27, 2018

A Minimal JavaScript Setup

Thursday, September 27, 2018 Teklinks

Some people prefer to write JavaScript with React. For others, it’s Vue or jQuery. For others still, it is their own set of tools or a completely blank document. Some setups are minimal, some allow you to get things done quickly, and some are crazy powerful, allowing you to build complex and maintainable applications. Every setup has advantages and disadvantages, but positives usually outweigh negatives when it comes to popular frameworks verified and vetted by an active community.

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Mmm... Pi-hole...

Thursday, September 27, 2018 Teklinks

I have a love-hate relationship with ad blockers. On the one hand, I despise the obnoxious ads that are forced down our throats at what seems like every turn. On the other hand, I appreciate the need for publishers to earn a living so that I can consume their hard-earned work for free.

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September 26, 2018

How to integrate Prettier with ESLint and stylelint

Wednesday, September 26, 2018 Teklinks

ESLint and stylelint are really amazing tools that allow you to enforce coding patterns among your teams. This has many benefits, like outputting better and more consistent code, getting rid of useless diffs in commits (newline, indentation, et al.) among many others.

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September 25, 2018

Essential React Libraries in 2018

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 Teklinks

React.js is only a view-layer library. Thus React only enables you to build component driven user interfaces. It comes with a couple of built-in solutions though, for instance local state management and syntactic events to make interactions happen, but after all you are only dealing with a view-layer library.

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What is Modular CSS?

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 Teklinks

Modular CSS is a collection of principles for writing code that is performant and maintainable at scale. It originated with developers at Yahoo and Yandex as a way to address the challenges of maintaining a large codebase.

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Demystifying The Service Worker Lifecycle

Tuesday, September 25, 2018 Teklinks

In an earlier article of mine, I talked about 4 essential things every PWA must have, which service worker happens to be part of. Service worker plays a very vital role when it's comes to Progressive Web Apps (PWA), as it is responsible for offline caching, push notifications, background sync etc.

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September 23, 2018

I Built the Ngrx Demo App with Akita. Here’s the Result.

Sunday, September 23, 2018 Teklinks

Akita is a simple and effective state management pattern, built on top of RxJS. Akita encourages simplicity. It saves you the hassle of creating boilerplate code and offers powerful tools with a moderate learning curve, suitable for both experienced and inexperienced developers alike.

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Idle Until Urgent — Philip Walton

Sunday, September 23, 2018 Teklinks

A few weeks ago I was looking at some of the performance metrics for my site. Specifically, I wanted to see how I was doing on our newest metric, first input delay (FID). My site is just a blog (and doesn’t run much JavaScript), so I expected to see pretty good results.

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How to organize your git branches

Sunday, September 23, 2018 Teklinks

I remember implementing git in my team. I think it was more than 6 years ago. At that time, A successful git branching model by Vincent Driessen was required reading if you wanted to learn how to work with git effectively. Since then, I've been following the "Git Flow" style.

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September 22, 2018

Immutability in React and Redux: The Complete Guide

Saturday, September 22, 2018 Teklinks

Immutability can be a confusing topic, and it pops up all over the place in React, Redux, and JavaScript in general. It’s tricky. It can be really subtle, especially if you’re not sure what to look for. And honestly, if you’re not sure why it matters, it’s hard to care.

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The "Developer Experience" Bait-and-Switch

Saturday, September 22, 2018 Teklinks

TL;DR: we cannot continue to use as much JavaScript as is now “normal” and expect the web to flourish. At the same time, most developers experience no constraint on their use of JS…until it’s too late.

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Build Your First App with React's Context API

Saturday, September 22, 2018 Teklinks

One of React's latest features is the Context API. Up until now, Context within React has been somewhat experimental, but still used in quite a few popular libraries, like Redux and React Router. There are plenty of ways to avoid using Context, but sometimes it can be really useful.

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Building A PWA Using Angular 6

Saturday, September 22, 2018 Teklinks

Upgrade your inbox and get our editors’ picks twice a month. Throughout this tutorial, we’ll be using Angular 6 to build a Progressive Web Application, step by step, implementing the core tenets of PWAs using Angular CLI v6.

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September 21, 2018

JavaScript Essentials: Arrays

Friday, September 21, 2018 Teklinks

Essentials is a series that covers the most used and important methods for X topic. It’s a series for developers who know another language or someone who wants a quick start. In this post we cover Arrays. It’s suggested that you know about Arrow Functions and Ternary expressions before reading.

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September 20, 2018

11 Javascript Data Visualization Libraries for 2018

Thursday, September 20, 2018 Teklinks

We live in an era of data explosion, when nearly every application we develop uses or leverages data to improve the experience delivered to the users. Sometimes, the best feature we can deliver to our users is the data itself.

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September 18, 2018

Keep your code clean forever

Tuesday, September 18, 2018 Teklinks

… because formatting your code manually in 2018 is already passé. You could still do it, but why? ;) Machine will be quicker and better at it. In addition, setting up all of it for your whole codebase will take you just about 5 to 15 minutes. Why not give it a try?

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JavaScript Beginners: Friendly Intro & Exercises

Tuesday, September 18, 2018 Teklinks

“Baby steps, & lots of practice.” That is the most common answer I hear to the How can I learn JavaScript? question. Because let’s face it: For JS beginners, the towering ecosystem that is JavaScript can be quite intimidating. At Snipcart, we have many users who aren’t JS experts—and that’s just fine. We often try to guide them towards a better understanding and best practices. Following the count your keystrokes principle, I decided to create an evergreen resource I could later point to!

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September 17, 2018

Cache your React event listeners to improve performance.

Monday, September 17, 2018 Teklinks

An under-appreciated concept in JavaScript is how objects and functions are references, and that directly impacts React performance. If you were to create two functions that are completely identical, they are still not equal. Try for yourself: Objects work the same way.

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(Deliberate) practice makes perfect: how to become an expert in anything

Monday, September 17, 2018 Teklinks

The human race is out-doing itself. We’re faster, smarter, stronger, more emotionally-intelligent and artistically-gifted than ever before. Take a look at any profession in the world today. From music to maths to track running, the previously-impossible is being achieved every day. Where does this continuous, steep upswing in the standards of excellence come from?

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September 16, 2018

Comparing the React and Vue Ecosystems with a Real-World SPA

Sunday, September 16, 2018 Teklinks

React vs Vue - a favorite talking point among developers. Many people pick a framework and stick to it, never really getting to know the library they left behind. That’s mainly due to time; the only way to really get to know the ins and outs of a system is to use it, struggle with it, grow with it.

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Intro to The 8-Point Grid System

Sunday, September 16, 2018 Teklinks

As a designer you’ve probably heard the term grid whether you’re designing a website, a magazine, or a mobile app. We have grids for all sorts of content arrangements. We use column grids to align content horizontally. Baseline grids to vertically align bodies of text.

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September 13, 2018

September 12, 2018

Render Caching for React

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Teklinks

Server Side Rendering (SSR) is a very useful technique that makes web apps appear faster. The initial HTML is displayed before the JavaScript is parsed and, while the user is deciding what to tap on, our handlers are ready.

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Goodbye Redux

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Teklinks

For the last few years, internet technologies have been shifting towards front-end JavaScript frameworks as a method of building better user experiences for web and mobile applications. This is awesome ? I personally love the flexibility that these frameworks give us.

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Design with Difficult Data

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Teklinks

You’ve been asked to design a profile screen for a mobile or web app. It will need to include an avatar, a name, a job title, and a location. You fire up Sketch or Figma. Maybe you pull out your drafting pencil or head straight to markup and CSS.

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Angular 6 Tutorial: New Features with New Power

Wednesday, September 12, 2018 Teklinks

Angular 6 is out! The most outstanding changes are in its CLI and how services get injected. If you are looking to write your very first Angular 6 app—or Angular/Firebase app—in this tutorial, we’ll go over the basic steps of initial setup and create a small diary app.

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September 11, 2018

A brief guide to using WebpageTest

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 Teklinks

The "Easy Mode" test run gives you a summary and three test runs. The summary looks a bit like this: The metric that jumps out the most is the one I didn't mention: "Load Time". The "Load Time" is an paltry 5.8 seconds. However, it does not tell the whole story.

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Removing jQuery from GitHub.com frontend

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 Teklinks

We have recently completed a milestone where we were able to drop jQuery as a dependency of the frontend code for GitHub.com. This marks the end of a gradual, years-long transition of increasingly decoupling from jQuery until we were able to completely remove the library.

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Exploring SMACSS: Scalable and Modular Architecture for CSS

Tuesday, September 11, 2018 Teklinks

When we are working on big projects or with groups of developers, we often find that our code is messy, difficult to read, and hard to extend. This is especially true after time passes and we come back and look at it again—we have to try to be in the same mindset where we were when we wrote it.

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September 10, 2018

An Introduction to NestJS for Ionic Developers

Monday, September 10, 2018 Teklinks

Creating a backend for your application has typically required a totally different skill set to what you might use for the front end. Over time, those lines have blurred as the likes of NodeJS and server-side JavaScript have risen in popularity.

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September 7, 2018

Progressive Web-First Apps

Friday, September 07, 2018 Teklinks

You have a cool idea, and you don’t think “there is an app for that” yet. The path is clear, right? Build an iOS app, because the VC you are pitching has one in their pocket, and you want high ARPU customers.

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September 6, 2018

33 Google Maps Tricks You Need to Try

Thursday, September 06, 2018 Teklinks

Google Maps has changed the way we navigate the world. Its desktop and mobile apps have become not just a way to get from point A to B via car, public transportation, or on foot. The ubiquitous Google service is also a geospatial search engine for the world around us.

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