tech/webdev magazine

May 31, 2020

Using Newman In Nodejs

Sunday, May 31, 2020 Teklinks

Few weeks ago we looked into automating Postman collection run using Newman CLI. On top of using the CLI directly, Newman can also be used in a NodeJS application which makes it very versatile to create tools for testing.

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Mirage JS Deep Dive: Understanding Factories, Fixtures And Serializers (Part 2)

Sunday, May 31, 2020 Teklinks

In the previous article of this series, we understudied Models and Associations as they relate to Mirage. I explained that Models allow us to create dynamic mock data that Mirage would serve to our application when it makes a request to our mock endpoints. In this article, we will look at three other Mirage features that allow for even more rapid API mocking. Let’s dive right in!

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The Fastest Google Fonts

Sunday, May 31, 2020 Teklinks

For the most part, web fonts nowadays are faster than ever. With more standardised FOUT/FOIT behaviour from browser vendors, to the newer font-display specification, performance—and therefore the user—seems to have been finally been put front-and-centre.

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May 29, 2020

Raspberry Pi 4 Gets Its 8 Gigs

Friday, May 29, 2020 Teklinks

What began as a rumor becomes reality. This morning [Eben Upton] announced that the newest flavor of the Raspberry Pi 4 comes with 8 gigabytes of RAM and a sticker price of $75, roughly twice that of the base model which is now pegged at 2 GB of ram.

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May 25, 2020

Rollup vs. Parcel vs. webpack: Which Is the Best Bundler?

Monday, May 25, 2020 Teklinks

Recently I was publishing a library to npm and I thought of experimenting with the bundler I was going to package my code in. While webpack has always been my standard choice, I decided to put it up against two other popular bundlers — Rollup and Parcel.

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useStatus: A Custom React Hook for Managing UI States

Monday, May 25, 2020 Teklinks

Handling UI states can start to make your template crowded and littered with variables. A recent talk I heard regarding State Machines inspired me to create a hook that helped me handle some issues that I constantly found myself running into.

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May 23, 2020

Gatsby won against Next.js in this head-to-head

Saturday, May 23, 2020 Teklinks

With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and social distancing measures, many events have been forced to migrate to online virtual events. I’m a software engineer at Antler, which runs a global startup generator program that usually runs multiple in-person Demo Day events a year that showcase around a dozen new startups, and we faced the same situation.

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State of Microfrontends

Saturday, May 23, 2020 Teklinks

Originally published at Bits and Pieces. One of the more controversial topics in frontend web dev is microfrontends. Are they worth it? Should you really split up your application? Do you really need to use this now?

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May 21, 2020

The Role of an Architect on a Scrum Team

Thursday, May 21, 2020 Teklinks

None of the Agile, Lean, or Scrum principles have a formal definition of responsibilities for a Software Architect. Some companies take it to the extreme and not hire a architect at all. Others that do hire one are not clear on architect’s role within the agile context.

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May 20, 2020

Building large scale react applications in a monorepo

Wednesday, May 20, 2020 Teklinks

A monorepo can be described as a repository that contains more than one logical project. These projects can be unrelated, loosely coupled or connected by dependency management tools, they are usually large in size, number of branches, commits and working developers.

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The New Windows Terminal Is Ready; Here’s Why It’s Amazing

Wednesday, May 20, 2020 Teklinks

Microsoft’s new Windows Terminal is finally stable. Windows finally has a more modern terminal environment including features like tabs, split panes, multiple session types, and settings that let you configure everything from keyboard shortcuts to animated GIF backgrounds.

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React + Docker with Security in 10 Minutes

Wednesday, May 20, 2020 Teklinks

You've built a React app, but now you need to deploy it. What do you do? First, it's probably best to choose a cloud provider as they're typically low-cost and easy to deploy to. Most cloud providers offer a way to deploy a static site. A built React app is just JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

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May 18, 2020

May 17, 2020

Make a Stellar React + NASA App in 10 Minutes

Sunday, May 17, 2020 Teklinks

One of the most stellar open API's out there is the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day. In today's article, we are going to mess around with that API and build an application that displays the photo of the day, the title of that photo, the current date, and some information about the picture.

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In defense of the modern web

Sunday, May 17, 2020 Teklinks

I expect I'll annoy everyone with this post: the anti-JavaScript crusaders, justly aghast at how much of the stuff we slather onto modern websites; the people arguing the web is a broken platform for interactive applications anyway and we should start over; React users; the old guard with their arti

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May 14, 2020

How CommonJS is making your bundles larger

Thursday, May 14, 2020 Teklinks

In this post, we'll look into what CommonJS is and why it's making your JavaScript bundles larger than necessary. Summary: To ensure the bundler can successfully optimize your application, avoid depending on CommonJS modules, and use ES2015 module syntax in your entire application.

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May 13, 2020

When does React re-render components?

Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Teklinks

React is known for providing a fast user experience by only updating the parts of the UI that have changed. When looking into React's render performance, there are a few terms and concepts that can be hard to understand.

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Jazz Up Your “ZSH” Terminal In Seven Steps

Wednesday, May 13, 2020 Teklinks

In this blog I’ll cover installing ITerm2, ZSH shell, “oh my ZSH”, Themes, ITerm2 color schemes, “oh my ZSH” plugins and enable “ligature” support to help create a beautiful and powerful Terminal.

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May 11, 2020

A new way to file upload in React

Monday, May 11, 2020 Teklinks

File uploading from the browser isn’t new. It’s been with us for a long time now. There are also plenty of projects and libraries aiming to help web applications that require this kind of functionality. Yet, there aren’t many that encompass all you need in one place.

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TypeScript at Slack

Monday, May 11, 2020 Teklinks

When Brendan Eich created the very first version of JavaScript for Netscape Navigator 2.0 in merely ten days, it’s likely that he did not expect how far the Slack Desktop App would take his invention: We use one JavaScript code base to build a multi-threaded desktop application, routinely interacting with native code, targeting Windows, macOS, and Linux.

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Facebook Engineering

Monday, May 11, 2020 Teklinks

Facebook.com launched in 2004 as a simple, server-rendered PHP website. Over time, we’ve added layer upon layer of new technology to deliver more interactive features. Each of these new features and technologies incrementally slowed the site down and made it harder to maintain.

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May 10, 2020

Write clean(er) Components & JSX

Sunday, May 10, 2020 Teklinks

A component that expects a prop (user) and can’t do anything without it, yet that property isn’t required and the default value is set to {} to avoid some Cannot access property 'name' of ... errors.

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5 Best Practices for writing clean JavaScript

Sunday, May 10, 2020 Teklinks

When writing our apps, we often tend to overlook the simplest principle when it comes to coding: maintaining a clean and readable source code. You probably heard the phrase of spaghetti code before. Meaning the codebase is hard to maintain, read or even decipher.

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May 9, 2020

What the heck is React Fast Refresh

Saturday, May 09, 2020 Teklinks

React Fast Refresh is the successor of React Hot Loader. It is fully supported by the React team and was initially shipped alongside React Native 0.6.1 back in 2019. The actual plan is to make it available eventually for the whole ecosystem since the core implementation is platform-agnostic.

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How to get started testing React applications

Saturday, May 09, 2020 Teklinks

All of this testing thing is like I’m in a maze! If you don’t have experience writing tests, getting started can be daunting. Especially if you’re trying to test code that interacts with a framework/library like it is when you’re testing a React application.

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5 Awesome React Packages You Need To Try Out

Saturday, May 09, 2020 Teklinks

I think we all know by now that static pages and server side rendering with technologies like Gatsby & Next.js are pretty handy for React. Pages that don’t require client-side rendering, which is the standard for React.js, tend to perform much better & are said to have SEO benefits.

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May 6, 2020

Checking In On Relatives Using Old Android Tablets

Wednesday, May 06, 2020 Teklinks

With social distancing it can be harder to stay in touch with our relatives, especially those who are elderly and not particularly tech-savvy. Looking for a solution to that end for his own grandmother, [Steve] came up with the idea of using an inexpensive used tablet and a mobile data plan in order to mail her a “video phone” that works out of the box.

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Mirage JS Deep Dive: Understanding Mirage JS Models And Associations (Part 1)

Wednesday, May 06, 2020 Teklinks

Mirage JS is helping simplify modern front-end development by providing the ability for front-end engineers to craft applications without relying on an actual back-end service. In this article, I’ll be taking a framework-agnostic approach to show you Mirage JS models and associations. If you haven’t heard of Mirage JS, you can read my previous article in which I introduce it and also integrate it with the progressive framework Vue.js.

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You know your Scrum Master sucks when…

Wednesday, May 06, 2020 Teklinks

Please, don’t hold your applause. In fact, I’d prefer if everyone rose from their seats each time I enter the room. It’s probably best if someone on the Development Team acts as a lookout so you’re already standing when I arrive for the Daily Scrum.

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May 3, 2020

Creating a Custom API with Strapi - A Node Headless CMS

Sunday, May 03, 2020 Teklinks

Strapi is an amazing tool that lets us build our backends without writing a line of code. It comes with an API out of the box. I would use Strapi as a Headless CMS because it allows for flexibility in content types. We could build a custom app whereas other CMSs are geared towards blogs.

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