Here’s a question I’ve heard a few times recently: “What if we create a component library in React/Vue/Angular/whatever and a new component technology replaces it?” That’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. These technologies have become wildly popular, but they’re not the end game. Like all…

Today many web apps are built using React, Angular, Vue, Ember, and others. These modern client-side rendered apps often call web APIs that are hosted on separate servers. This creates a problem: how do you configure your app to call the right API URL in each environment? For example, during…

Disclaimer: BenQ gave me this monitor for free in exchange for this review. That said, as you’ll see these are my honest impressions. As a software developer, I’ve run 2 or 3 monitors for years. But a few years ago I realized I preferred using a single display. The question…

What Legos Can Teach Us About Reuse in React Apps — React is a component library. So React makes it easy to break your UI down into composable pieces. The question is, how granular should the pieces be? Let’s consider a specific example that I explored in a previous post. Imagine your team just deployed a ToDo app, built in React…

How I’ve learned to live with — even love — a flawed machine — I previously owned a 2015 13" MacBook Pro, but purchased a 15" Macbook Pro TouchBar in Nov. 2016. I posted an initial review after one week. The results after one year? It’s been a mixed bag, but here’s the tl;dr: There are keyboard and reliability issues, but all considered I…

Avoid repeating yourself by centralizing PropTypes — There are three popular ways to handle types in React: PropTypes, TypeScript and Flow. This post is about PropTypes, which are currently the most popular. Since PropTypes provide type warnings at runtime, it’s helpful to be as specific as possible. Component accepts an object? Declare the object’s shape. Prop…

Are React’s Functional Components Worth The Cost? — Update 5/31/19: React 16.8 added Hooks, which mean you can use functional components for nearly everything! 🎉 Function components are the future of React. So bottom-line, use functional components for future development. That said, the tradeoffs below apply for older codebases where Hooks aren’t an option. Happy coding! I’m spending…

Standardize your React development with these key decisions — React was open-sourced in 2013. Since then, it has evolved. As you search the web, you’ll stumble across old posts with dated approaches. So, here are eight key decisions your team needs to make when writing React components today. Decision 1: Dev Environment Before you write your first component, your team needs to agree…

Three patterns for running the same app in multiple spots — Imagine your team just deployed an amazing todo list app. A month later, another team in your company wants to run your todo app within their invoice app. So now you need to run your todo app in two spots: By itself Embedded within the invoice app What’s the best…