tech/webdev magazine

December 31, 2019

5 VS Code Extensions That’ll Change Your Dev Life

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 Teklinks

Creating variables in SCSS is awesome. Remembering them? Not so much. If you’re like me, you’ve got a _variables.scss partial with hundreds of dollar signs in it and names you came up with at 3 a.m. the previous night.

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Control your components

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 Teklinks

React is a pretty neat piece of technology. Its component-centric design lets us create reusable pieces of code - pieces that can be used over and over again in new contexts with new demands to its flexibility.

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Decoding the Front-end Interview Process

Tuesday, December 31, 2019 Teklinks

As a front-end developer, it’s inevitable that you will encounter a front-end technical interview (or ten). Unfortunately the process for a front-end development interview can be a bit unclear, and will vary from company to company.

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December 30, 2019

The 10 Component Commandments

Monday, December 30, 2019 Teklinks

Written in collaboration with Caroline Odden. Based on the talk with the same name and people, held at the ReactJS Oslo Meetup in June 2019. Creating components that are used by a lot of people is hard.

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Progressive React

Monday, December 30, 2019 Teklinks

What does it mean to build a site that more people can use? How does this get measured? Why should this get measured? Let’s try and answer this question by taking a look at the easiest way to start building a React app - Create React App. A brand new project from scratch has the following dependencies.

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December 26, 2019

Enterprise React in 2020

Thursday, December 26, 2019 Teklinks

In my previous article published about a year ago I presented the React tech stack which I called Enterprise React. It is the opinionated set of libraries and technical approaches to quickly build scalable enterprise class applications in React.

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December 25, 2019

What Is JavaScript Made Of?

Wednesday, December 25, 2019 Teklinks

During my first few years of using JavaScript, I felt like a fraud. Even though I could build websites with frameworks, something was missing. I dreaded JavaScript job interviews because I didn’t have a solid grasp on fundamentals.

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Cracking the front-end interview

Wednesday, December 25, 2019 Teklinks

Technical front-end interviews are difficult. That’s a fact. Not only do you need to have a solid grasp of computer science fundamentals, but also an understanding of things like web performance, build systems, and CSS layout engines.

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December 24, 2019

Feature watch: ECMAScript 2020

Tuesday, December 24, 2019 Teklinks

This blog post tracks actual and potential features of ES2020. I will continually update it. Note that since the TC39 process was instituted, the importance of ECMAScript versions has much decreased.

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From Redux to Hooks: A Case Study

Tuesday, December 24, 2019 Teklinks

After several years of using Redux for most of our projects we decided to try useReducer/useContext approach instead. Here is what we learned. Using Hooks instead of Redux for state management is by no means easier.

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December 23, 2019

Build a chat app with Laravel and Vue

Monday, December 23, 2019 Teklinks

It's been a while since I wrote about Laravel and thought I should do something fun with it. In this tutorial, I will show you how to build a web-based chat application using Laravel and Vue.js quickly.

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The Best Investment Is In Yourself

Monday, December 23, 2019 Teklinks

When I finished graduate school in 2011, I was fed up with education. I was so tired of books and classes that I only wanted to put what I learned into practice. I didn’t invest in my education for two full years. That wasn’t a smart move. During those two years, I didn’t make much progress.

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An Introduction to Web Scraping with Puppeteer

Monday, December 23, 2019 Teklinks

Learn Puppeteer with me in this article. I saw a video a few days ago on DevTips where they attempted to use Puppeteer, I’ve never used it myself and thought it looked really cool. So I gave it a try and I’m sharing what I’ve learned here.

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These 6 essential tools will release, version, and maintain your NPM modules for you

Monday, December 23, 2019 Teklinks

That’s why your favorite obscure library with 1 or 2 contributors has not merged your pull request. In order to remedy this situation, a suite of automation tools can be employed to free you from the shackles of keeping dependencies up-to-date, ensuring code quality, and releasing new versions of your software.

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December 22, 2019

34 most popular GitHub JS repositories in November 2019

Sunday, December 22, 2019 Teklinks

Originally I shared this digest to Syndicode blog. When you understand that the tech stack behind your project is outdated, you should stand for changing it. Luckily, today I can offer you a pretty pool of alternatives to the old tools you used previously.

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Manage Global State with Context API and Hooks

Sunday, December 22, 2019 Teklinks

Global State – What? Why? So, you have created a new JavaScript app? Cool. Using React? Even better! And filled it with several independent components? Awesome! If only there was a way for all of them to be friends and talk to each other in a convenient way.

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December 21, 2019

Use GitHub actions at your own risk

Saturday, December 21, 2019 Teklinks

For instance to build and publish docker images to a registry you could use elgohr/Publish-Docker-Github-Action action. It is the most popular action to perform this task and it is not made nor maintained by GitHub.

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December 20, 2019

7 Tools for Building Your Design System in 2020

Friday, December 20, 2019 Teklinks

Legend has it that the first design system was introduced by NASA in 1976. Since then, design systems turned into a widely common practice used to standardize design and development of a visual language in multiple instances across different teams, projects and applications.

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How to Memoize Components in React

Friday, December 20, 2019 Teklinks

Memoizing in React is a performance feature of the framework that aims to speed up the render process of components. The technique is used in a wide spectrum of disciplines, from game engines to web applications.

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December 18, 2019

How to Do Good Code Reviews

Wednesday, December 18, 2019 Teklinks

Years back when I started as a junior developer, I was a happy-go-lucky person. My activities were limited: write code - get it reviewed - rewrite the code. Life was great. My job was just to peruse the code comments I received and learn to be a better developer every day.

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December 17, 2019

Simple React Patterns

Tuesday, December 17, 2019 Teklinks

I've been writing React applications for a few years now, and I've noticed that some patterns tend to repeat themselves. In this post, I'll review these patterns which will summarize about 99% of the React code I write every day.

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Here Are 11 Console Commands Every Developer Should Know

Tuesday, December 17, 2019 Teklinks

The command line makes our life so much easier since we can automate several mundane tasks and make things run smoother. Instead of clicking around in the Graphical User Interface (GUI), we can fire off a couple of commands and call it job done.

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A Common JavaScript Interview Question Asked By Google & Amazon

Tuesday, December 17, 2019 Teklinks

Interviewers are asking this type of question to really test your knowledge of important JavaScript concepts. By answering this question correctly, you can display your understanding of block scope, closures, anon functions, and Immediately Invoked Function Expressions (IIFE).

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December 15, 2019

JavaScript ‪Module Cheatsheet ?‬

Sunday, December 15, 2019 Teklinks

Here’s a cheatsheet to show you the different ways of exporting and the corresponding way to import it. It really distills to 3 types: name, default, and list. Just make sure your export matches your import way and you will have no problem ? The key here is having a name.

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Migrating to GraphQL at Airbnb

Sunday, December 15, 2019 Teklinks

Airbnb has successfully migrated much of its API to GraphQL, resulting in improved page load times and a more intuitive user experience. In a presentation at GraphQL Summit, Brie Bunge described the multi-stage migration process that has been used across many teams at Airbnb.

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December 12, 2019

11 Top React Developer Tools for 2020

Thursday, December 12, 2019 Teklinks

JavaScript is famous for the number of frameworks and tools that are created around it every week, and React, being one of the most popular of those frameworks as of late, “suffers” a similar fate, causing new developers to get overwhelmed when they attempt to start delving into the technology.

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CSS Architecture for Modern JavaScript Applications

Thursday, December 12, 2019 Teklinks

I went to a JavaScript meet-up in Sydney the other night and asked the question "How many people know what CSS Architecture is?". The room was full of different people with varying backgrounds and experience. I thought at minimum around a quarter might know what I was talking about.

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Natural language processing for Node.js

Thursday, December 12, 2019 Teklinks

The internet facilitates a never-ending creation of large volumes of unstructured textual data. Luckily, we have modern systems that can make sense of this kind of data.

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December 11, 2019

Top 5 Software Testing Trends to Review From 2019

Wednesday, December 11, 2019 Teklinks

Over the period of 2019, a massive wave of new approaches and innovations came to software testing landscape at an exponential way. Along with those new introductions is the continuation of technological improvement, evolution, and reinvention.

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December 10, 2019

6 Patterns for Microfrontends

Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Teklinks

Microfrontends are not a new thing, but certainly a recent trend. Coined in 2016, the pattern slowly gained popularity as problems started to appear when developing large scale web apps.

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What Makes a Good Scrum Master?

Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Teklinks

Atomic does not have a dedicated scrum master position. The closest comparison is our delivery lead role, which is a blend of project management, account management, and product management. However, we often work with clients that do have dedicated scrum masters.

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The unseen performance costs of CSS-in-JS in React apps

Tuesday, December 10, 2019 Teklinks

CSS-in-JS is becoming a popular choice for any new front-end app out there, due to the fact that it offers a better API for developers to work with. Don’t get me wrong, I love CSS, but creating a proper CSS architecture is not an easy task.

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December 8, 2019

npm Commands and Features You Should Know

Sunday, December 08, 2019 Teklinks

I love the npm CLI. Sorry, not sorry. npm has caught some flak over the years for one reason or another. Nevertheless, its command line interface is ubiquitous. It’s the foundation for most modern build systems and it’s still the most popular solution for managing project dependencies.

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A Guide to Understanding GSAP JavaScript Animation

Sunday, December 08, 2019 Teklinks

The use of animation is one of the best ways to make your website stand out. When smartly implemented, it can dazzle users and call attention to your most important content. Of course, web animation has been around for years.

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December 7, 2019

The Problem with React's Context API

Saturday, December 07, 2019 Teklinks

React’s context API is awesome. As someone that looked at Redux as a junior developer and instantly felt defeated, learning about context was a relief. I used it in my apps, quickly forgot about Redux, and never looked back.

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New JavaScript Features Coming in ES2020 That You Can Use Now

Saturday, December 07, 2019 Teklinks

Since the release of ES6 in 2015, JavaScript has been evolving fast with tons of new features coming out in each iteration. The new versions of the JavaScript language specification have been updated yearly, with new language feature proposal being finalized faster than ever.

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