tech/webdev magazine

November 30, 2018

How we reduced our initial JS/CSS size by 67%

Friday, November 30, 2018 Teklinks

We have been working on reducing the amount of bytes that we send to all Fider users. Being a web application built with React, we have focused on JS and CSS. On this post we share our learnings, some concepts and suggestions on how you can do the same with your web application.

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Creating Horizontal Scrolling Containers the Right Way [CSS Grid]

Friday, November 30, 2018 Teklinks

Ever since Netflix became a household name we’ve been scrolling sideways in mobile layouts. Instead of stacking everything on top of each other, horizontal scrolling containers (or lists) have become a common layout practice, as it helps reduce the vertical space of devices with smaller screens.

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Boost Your Vue.js Workflow With Vue CLI 3

Friday, November 30, 2018 Teklinks

We can hardly imagine modern web development without the help of Command Line Interface (CLI) tools. They tremendously facilitate and speed up the development workflow by reducing the amount of repetitive and tedious tasks.

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November 28, 2018

Simplify Styling with Functional CSS

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Teklinks

Do you dread styling your apps? Fear that a change might break the styles you crafted through many hours of labour? I'm here to tell you that there's another way. Introducing functional CSS.

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10 Node Frameworks to Use in 2019

Wednesday, November 28, 2018 Teklinks

More developers have switched to using JavaScript to build more applications, especially for the web. This has brought about an exponential growth in the usage of frameworks built specifically for the JavaScript community to facilitate quick prototyping and building of awesome projects. When Node.

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November 27, 2018

Best command line utilities

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Teklinks

As a developer, you probably use command line most often.Here are some of the command line utilities that make your life a little bit easier. HTTPie is a command line HTTP client. Its goal is to make CLI interaction with web services as human-friendly as possible.

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Deploying a Node App to Google Cloud with Kubernetes

Tuesday, November 27, 2018 Teklinks

Let’s look at how to deploy a Node/Express microservice (along with Postgres) to a Kubernetes cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). This article assumes that you have basic working knowledge of Docker and an understanding of microservices in general.

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November 25, 2018

After two years with TypeScript – was it worth it?

Sunday, November 25, 2018 Teklinks

Almost two years ago I started a new greenfield project in a small agile team. Microservices, docker, react, redux, all that fancy stuff. I had some experience with similar front-end technologies, because I had spent the previous year on a pretty big react application written by over 20 front-end developers. It was quite challenging for me.

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Engineering Management : Lessons learned in first year

Sunday, November 25, 2018 Teklinks

It’s winter season and am getting close to a year of full-time engineering management. So, I’m listening to some jazz house music and reflecting on what I have learned. While I have done tech lead roles before, this is the first role I’ve been doing people management full time, i.e.

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November 24, 2018

Web workers vs Service workers vs Worklets

Saturday, November 24, 2018 Teklinks

Web workers, service workers, and worklets. All of these are what I would call “Javascript Workers”, and although they do have some similarities in how they work, they have very little overlap in what they are used for.

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As a JS Developer, This Is What Keeps Me Up at Night

Saturday, November 24, 2018 Teklinks

JavaScript is an oddball of a language. Though inspired by Smalltalk, it uses a C-like syntax. It combines aspects of procedural, functional, and object-oriented programming (OOP) paradigms. It has numerous, often redundant, approaches to solving almost any conceivable programming problem and is not strongly opinionated about which are preferred. It’s weakly and dynamically typed, with a mazelike approach to type coercion that trips up even experienced developers.

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November 22, 2018

Error Handling & Angular

Thursday, November 22, 2018 Teklinks

If you are more than… 2 years old, you’d have realized that indeed shit happens, and your apps are not an exception. When it happens you can ignore it, and let the bad grow, or do something, and improve the world.

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November 21, 2018

November 20, 2018

Build a CRUD App in React with Hooks

Tuesday, November 20, 2018 Teklinks

In the latest alpha release of React, a new concept was introduced – Hooks. Hooks are being added to React as an alternative to classes. If you use React right now, you’ll be familiar with simple (functional) components and class components.

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The 2018 React JS RoadMap

Tuesday, November 20, 2018 Teklinks

The React JS or simply React is one of the leading JavaScript libraries for developing front-end or GUI of web applications. Backed by Facebook, React JS, also known as just React is has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years and became the de-facto library for component-based GUI development.

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November 19, 2018

The Smaller, More Powerful Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+

Monday, November 19, 2018 Teklinks

It’s that time of year again, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation has some new hardware for you. This time, it’s an improved version of the Raspberry Pi Model A, bringing it the speed and power of its bigger brother, the Raspberry Pi Model 3 B+.

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November 15, 2018

Understanding JSON Web Token Authentication

Thursday, November 15, 2018 Teklinks

In this article, we will take a look at what JSON Web Token is all about. We will start with a basic explanation of JWT, then look at its structure, and finally create a simple server that will take some data and insert it into a JWT.

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A Study Plan To Cure JavaScript Fatigue

Thursday, November 15, 2018 Teklinks

Like everybody else, I recently came across Jose Aguinaga’s post “How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016”. It’s clear that this post hit a nerve: I saw it reaching the top spot on Hacker News not once but twice.

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CSS and Network Performance

Thursday, November 15, 2018 Teklinks

Despite having been called CSS Wizardry for over a decade now, there hasn’t been a great deal of CSS-related content on this site for a while. Let me address that by combining my two favourite topics: CSS and performance.

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November 14, 2018

Design Patterns in Web Development

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Teklinks

Before diving down in this series you might want to know why I am writing this. My name is Manuel and I am a more-or-less Italian more-or-less lifelong geek. Although I am doing web development since the dark ages of "tables", I decided to make software development a full time job only three years ago.

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The Most Awesome Online Teachers for Learning Web Development

Wednesday, November 14, 2018 Teklinks

For the past few months, I have been on a learning spree looking to enhance my existing coding skills and also learn new programming languages and frameworks. In this process, I have watched a countless number of video tutorials and online courses that pertain to programming and, specifically, web development.

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November 12, 2018

CSS Frameworks Or CSS Grid: What Should I Use For My Project?

Monday, November 12, 2018 Teklinks

Among the questions I am most frequently asked is some variety of the question, “Should I use CSS Grid or Bootstrap?” In this article, I will take a look at that question. You will discover that the reasons for using frameworks are varied, and not simply centered around use of the grid system contained in that framework. I hope that by unpacking these reasons, I can help you to make your own decision, in terms of what is best for the sites and applications that you are working on, and also for the team you work with.

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Implementing Smooth Scrolling in React

Monday, November 12, 2018 Teklinks

Smooth Scrolling, dont know what it is? Well, instead of clicking on a button and being instantly taken to a different part of the (same) page, the user is navigated there via a scroll animation. It's one of those subtle features on a site that makes an incredible difference in terms of aesthetics.

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Top JavaScript Trends To Look For In 2019

Monday, November 12, 2018 Teklinks

As we know that the digital world is multi-layered, several pieces of technology come together to offer you an experience through a smart screen. The development of JavaScript is changing rapidly, especially in the last twelve months. 2018 was a year with a lot of action, changes and new initiatives in front-end web development.

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Git aliases I can't live without

Monday, November 12, 2018 Teklinks

My love for aliases started when I installed zsh and its addon suite oh-my-zsh for the first time. It contains a big set of predefined aliases and helper functions for different command line programs.

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November 10, 2018

Continuous Integration: The What, Why and How

Saturday, November 10, 2018 Teklinks

Not long ago, I had a novice understanding of Continuous Integration (CI) and thought it seemed like an extra process that forces engineers to do extra work on already large projects. My team began to implement CI into projects and, after some hands-on experience, I realized its great benefits, not only to the company, but to me, an engineer! In this post, I will describe CI, the benefits I’ve discovered, and how to implement it for free, and fast.

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These tools will help you write clean code

Saturday, November 10, 2018 Teklinks

Learning to write good code, but you don’t know where to start… Going through style-guides like Airbnb’s Javascript Style Guide… Trying to write code with best practices... Removing dead code? Finding unused variables in the code base? Trying to find problematic patterns in your code? Like, does it return or not?

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Top 12 Things That Destroy Developer Productivity

Saturday, November 10, 2018 Teklinks

No one expects a programmer to get work done without access to a computer, but there are many companies that expect programmers to get work done without access to their mind. This is equally unrealistic. So let’s deep dive into our list of 12 things that prevent your developers from getting “into the zone” and being productive. I will try to prioritize this list from most to least impactful. Feel free to comment!

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November 8, 2018

What and How to Test with Jest and Enzyme

Thursday, November 08, 2018 Teklinks

Testing React components may be challenging for beginners and experienced developers who have already worked with tests. It may be interesting to compare your own approaches with the ones we use in our project.

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A Netflix Web Performance Case Study

Thursday, November 08, 2018 Teklinks

tl;dr: There are no silver bullets to web performance. Simple static pages benefit from being server-rendered with minimal JavaScript. Libraries can provide great value for complex pages when used with care. Netflix is one of the most popular video streaming services.

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November 7, 2018

Publishing private NPM packages to Nexus

Wednesday, November 07, 2018 Teklinks

We’ve all worked on projects which give us an opportunity to build reusable components. Most of the times these components end up in the shared folder of the project. This folder then gets copy-pasted into several projects which over time become a nightmare to update as we cannot easily have multiple versions of a component and maintaining the same code base on multiple branches as versions is kind of a hacky solution to this problem.

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November 6, 2018

Connection-Aware Components in Angular

Tuesday, November 06, 2018 Teklinks

The navigator.connection object contains a read-only property named effectiveType, which returns the effective connection type. That type is determined using a combination of recently observed RTT (round-trip time) and downlink values. (at the time of writing, browser support is limited)

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GraphQL - The good and the bad

Tuesday, November 06, 2018 Teklinks

GraphQL is a query language for APIs and a runtime for fulfilling those queries with your existing data. GraphQL provides a complete and understandable description of the data in your API as well as gives clients the power to ask for exactly what they need and nothing more.

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Nrwl Nx 7.0: Better E2E testing with Cypress

Tuesday, November 06, 2018 Teklinks

With Nrwl’s recent announcement about Nx 7, we’re happy to let you know that Nx 7 provides you with the option to use Cypress as an end-to-end test runner! Nrwl Extensions for Angular (aka Nrwl Nx) is an open source toolkit for enterprise applications, which we developed at Nrwl, based on our experience working at Google and helping Fortune 500 enterprises to build ambitious Angular applications.

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The Complete JavaScript Handbook

Tuesday, November 06, 2018 Teklinks

JavaScript is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, and is now widely used also outside of the browser. The rise of Node.js in the last few years unlocked back-end development …

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November 2, 2018