tech/webdev magazine

August 31, 2022

How I structure my teams for growth

Wednesday, August 31, 2022 Teklinks

Having worked in a number of scale-ups in the last 10 years, there are a few principles I have adopted for scaling Tech and Product teams. The first one, is to organize teams to be cross-functional.

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August 30, 2022

Not all engineering leaders are engineering managers

Tuesday, August 30, 2022 Teklinks

Great managers make great teams, and organisations are rightfully eager to find engineers with manager potential. But management should not be the default career path for engineers. Many of the "leadership" skills that make for good managers (e.g.

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Monitor Events and Function Calls via Console

Tuesday, August 30, 2022 Teklinks

Despite having worked on the very complex Firefox for a number of years, I'll always love plain old console.log debugging. Logging can provide an audit trail as events happen and text you can share with others.

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August 29, 2022

Resumability, WTF?

Monday, August 29, 2022 Teklinks

Maybe you've heard the term Resumability thrown around recently. Maybe someone gushing over Miško Hevery's new Qwik framework. Maybe you've heard me mention it in our work for the upcoming Marko 6. Maybe you heard it has something to do with hydration. But you aren't even clear what hydration is.

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How to use Forms in React

Monday, August 29, 2022 Teklinks

Sooner or later every React developer has to handle forms. The following tutorial will give you a comprehensive overview about forms in React. You will learn how to manage form state in React, the difference of controlled and uncontrolled forms (state vs reference), how to submit a form (e.g.

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August 26, 2022

The JavaScript Paradox

Friday, August 26, 2022 Teklinks

I'm not sure if there's ever been a language more loathed, yet so widely used, as JavaScript. I'm not of that camp. I quite like JavaScript. Its quirks, its flaws. How it somehow built upon Scheme yet was destined to be the most pervasive programming language.

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How to use OpenTelemetry to trace Node.js applications

Friday, August 26, 2022 Teklinks

One great thing about Node.js is how well it performs inside a container. The shift to containerized deployments and environments comes with extra complexity. This article addresses the added complexity of observability—seeing what's going on within your application and its resources.

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How to interrogate unfamiliar code

Friday, August 26, 2022 Teklinks

A popular claim about code is that it’s read ten times as often as it’s written. This is generally used as an argument for fastidious coding: you’re going to be seeing your code a lot, so spend some extra time on quality.

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August 24, 2022

Writing a testable components library with NX in under 10 minutes

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 Teklinks

It’s no secret that a components library is a great way to share components between teams, save time, and simplify complex projects. I won’t delve into every single advantage of a component library (you can easily find them by googling), but there’s still a lot to write about its implementation.

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How to Create a Full-Text Search Engine in Postgres

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 Teklinks

I recently worked on a task researching options for a search service to integrate into our application. I initially wrote off traditional relational databases in favor of more trendy options like ElasticSearch or AWS CloudSearch. These products left me feeling overwhelmed.

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Speech Recognition with JavaScript

Wednesday, August 24, 2022 Teklinks

Some time ago, speech recognition API was added to the specs and we got partial support on Chrome, Safari, Baidu, android webview, iOS safari, samsung internet and Kaios browsers (see browser support in detail).

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August 22, 2022

Six Tips for Staying Technical as a CTO

Monday, August 22, 2022 Teklinks

During my engineering career, I made a choice to leave the Individual Contributor (IC) track and move into a technical leadership role. At the time, I felt that I had achieved knowledge and technical depth in a number of engineering disciplines and wanted to try leadership.

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August 20, 2022

Use Storybook with Tailwind in an Nx Workspace

Saturday, August 20, 2022 Teklinks

In the previous article, we talked about Nx workspace generators and how they can help be more efficient in automating repetitive tasks. In this article, we’re going to leverage Nx’s excellent support for Storybook to develop our components in isolation before using them in our Next.js app.

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Software Engineering - The Soft Parts

Saturday, August 20, 2022 Teklinks

Today I'll share some of the software engineering "soft skills" I've learned from my first 10 years on Google Chrome, where I am a Senior Staff Engineering Manager. On my 10th anniversary, I wanted to reflect on some of lessons that have stayed with me.

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Profiling & Optimizing a React Application with DevTools

Saturday, August 20, 2022 Teklinks

One thing that I noticed was how laggy the scrolling experience was and how much I should wait until I was able to click elements of the page and receive feedback. The page’s interactivity was slow and jank. So I started investigating this problem. And I knew it was a “performance” problem.

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August 18, 2022

Automate API Documentation and TypeScript Types with OpenAPI

Thursday, August 18, 2022 Teklinks

Recently, my assigned task was updating the API documentation on a project to OpenAPI format. The process of translating the old Markdown file to the proper YAML format felt somewhat tedious, begging the question, “Is this worth it?” However, once I started to dig into the uses of OpenAPI, I realized the numerous benefits far outweighed the upfront effort.

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Don’t call it a comeback: Why Java is still champ

Thursday, August 18, 2022 Teklinks

No matter what ranking system you look at, whether the TIOBE Index, the Popularity of Programming Language Index, RedMonk’s bi-annual language rankings, or GitHub’s yearly State of the Octoverse, Java has been sitting among the top three languages since shortly after its launch in 1995.

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Ultrasonic payments

Thursday, August 18, 2022 Teklinks

Recently, my colleague Mike Bifulco wrote a blog post about using Near-Field Communication (NFC) technology to request payment using NFC tags and Stripe Payment Links.

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August 17, 2022

Everything Developers Must Know About Figma

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 Teklinks

Christine highlights some of Figma’s features and possibilities to help you build a design that aligns with code as much as needed and improve your team work. We must understand the possibilities and limitations of each other’s tools to work hand in hand, so let me show you the design side of things and all the little Figma treasures you might not yet understand fully.

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Measurable and meaningful skill levels for developers

Wednesday, August 17, 2022 Teklinks

Understanding and supporting developers’ skills is something I think about a lot. Let me explain why. First, I spent many a good hour of my youth learning BASIC on a Commodore 64 (shout out to cassette tape memory drives!) and then a 30 pound IBM “Portable.

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August 15, 2022

How we made the Vercel Dashboard twice as fast

Monday, August 15, 2022 Teklinks

We want to keep the Vercel Dashboard fast for every customer, especially as we add and improve features. Aiming to lift our Core Web Vitals, our Engineering Team took the Lighthouse score for our Dashboard from 51 to 94.

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August 13, 2022

How To Build A Localized Website With Hugo And Strapi

Saturday, August 13, 2022 Teklinks

Localizing your site can benefit your business or organization in several ways. By translating your content or site, you expand the markets you target. Adapting your product to the language and cultural preferences of potential customers who were not able to use your product before boosts your conversion rates.

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What Makes Team Members or Clients Fun to Work With?

Saturday, August 13, 2022 Teklinks

When I reflect on previous project experiences, rarely do I actually reflect on the work itself. Instead, I often find myself describing projects in terms of the people. I might describe a project by the difficulty I had creating camaraderie with a client project manager.

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Stop The Screen Going To Sleep With JavaScript

Saturday, August 13, 2022 Teklinks

We've all been there. Cooking a complex recipe where each step takes a good couple of minutes. Our hands covered in some type of sauce made of who knows how many ingredients. We go to check the next step on our phone only to see that it's gone to sleep due to inactivity.

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August 11, 2022

Designing inflatable Microservices Architecture

Thursday, August 11, 2022 Teklinks

MSA that morphs depending upon scale without overcomplicating development. We’ve all read of the million transactions/sec systems of Google or Linkedin. And we’ve read about the scale of Netflix and its success with Microservices architecture‌‌ (MSA).

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Why we had to move away from React Query

Thursday, August 11, 2022 Teklinks

Last year we started using React Query for all of our API calls (and we talked about it in this article about optimizing API calls). However, the more we were using it, the more obvious it became that React Query was not providing the ideal structure for our data.

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500ms to 1.7ms In React: A Journey And A Checklist

Thursday, August 11, 2022 Teklinks

I bet the need to tweak perfomance comes in a certain phase of development for every developer, in every app. There are very good resources and articles about how to tweak performance in react and this article is no exception.

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How to Use Leaflet to Display Google Maps-like Maps in a React App

Thursday, August 11, 2022 Teklinks

Sometimes you’re building a React app and need to display a map or a map-like component on the screen. Leaflet is a JavaScript library that allows you to do just that. Here’s a quick tutorial that will show you how to set it up quickly and get a map displayed on your app.

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August 10, 2022

The Best Software Engineering Career Paths

Wednesday, August 10, 2022 Teklinks

I am a software engineer that graduated in computer science 20 years ago and since then have been building software one way or another. I have worked in all sorts of environments, like small startups, consultancy companies, big companies, launched a few startups over the years, and everything in between. Among many places, I worked for Upstart, Airbnb, and Stripe.

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How do database indexes work?

Wednesday, August 10, 2022 Teklinks

If you’ve queried a database, you’ve probably used an index, even if you didn't know it at the time. Database indexes help speed up read queries by creating ancillary data structures that make your scans faster.

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August 9, 2022

How To Use Multithreading in Node.js

Tuesday, August 09, 2022 Teklinks

The author selected Open Sourcing Mental Illness to receive a donation as part of the Write for DOnations program. Node.js runs JavaScript code in a single thread, which means that your code can only do one task at a time. However, Node.

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React code conventions and best practices

Tuesday, August 09, 2022 Teklinks

All the major tools for React provide linting rules. If you like, feel free to edit them to fit your style, but always use some and automate the process of linting and formatting. Preferred tools are eslint and prettier. Add some import order rules to your eslint config.

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August 8, 2022

Micro-frontend with React and Next.js

Monday, August 08, 2022 Teklinks

Working on a large-scale project and managing its codebase can be a big challenge for teams. Though micro-frontends have been in the picture for a while now, they are getting increasingly popular because of their unique features and usability.

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A Quick Overview of NFT Token Transfer and Approval

Monday, August 08, 2022 Teklinks

From my last post about NFT staking contracts, I received a message on Twitter from a developer. That developer was creating a staking contract for an NFT project but was getting the following error: “ERC721: transfer caller is not owner nor approved”.

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When Microservices Are a Bad Idea

Monday, August 08, 2022 Teklinks

On paper, microservices sound wonderful. They are modular, scalable, and fault tolerant. A lot of companies have had great success using this model, so microservices might naturally seem to be the superior architecture and the best way to start new applications.

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August 4, 2022

Node.js ORMs overview and comparison

Thursday, August 04, 2022 Teklinks

I believe that ORM is the most important tool for backend development, the tool we spend the most of time working on a feature, the tool we scold the most, always wanting for something better. Here I'm doing a review of 6 popular ORMs to compare and to find the best one.

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Hermes as the Default

Thursday, August 04, 2022 Teklinks

Last October, we announced that we had started work towards making Hermes the default engine for all React Native apps. Hermes has provided a lot of value to React Native inside of Meta, and we believe the open-source community will benefit as well.

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Design a Notification System

Thursday, August 04, 2022 Teklinks

Financial orgs: It is very important to tell people about their upcoming payments. ECommerce orgs: When subscribed to an e-commerce outlet, customers may be notified of the availability of a product, order placement, or order shipment.

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August 3, 2022

August 1, 2022

Selenium vs Cypress: Does Cypress Replace Selenium?

Monday, August 01, 2022 Teklinks

Learn how Cypress compares to Selenium, a better choice in the software testing world, in terms of speed test, architecture, language support, and much more. By automating the entire test procedure, your company will not only save money and time but also deliver superior quality products.

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An in-depth perspective on webpack's bundling process

Monday, August 01, 2022 Teklinks

Webpack is a very powerful and interesting tool that can be considered a fundamental component in many of today's technologies that web developers use to build their applications. However, many people would argue it is quite a challenge to work with it, mostly due to its complexity.

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