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Interviews, field notes, and essays from the JavaScript ecosystem.

The archive is built around developer interviews, with shorter posts on JavaScript, tooling, conferences, learning, and the web platform mixed in.

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Use the topic index if you are looking for a specific technology or theme.

Main format

The archive is interview-heavy, so it is useful for discovering tools directly through their authors.

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What you will find

The blog works best as a long-running map of frontend practice, library design, and community history.

Libraries

Interviews with maintainers explain the tradeoffs behind their APIs.

Practice

Posts cover learning, tooling, performance, maintenance, and architecture.

Context

Conference and event reports capture what was visible in the field at the time.

Post archive

Posts are listed newest first. The archive is broad, so the topic index is often the fastest route into older material.

Browse topics
Impressions on Web Summit 2024 Web Summit 2024 occurred from 11 to 14.11 in Lisbon, Portugal. Despite its name, the summit does not focus on the web. …
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State management is one of those recurring themes in frontend development. State becomes an issue when you try to build something even a little comple…
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Since the launch of ChatGPT, there has been a lot of interest in AI systems. The question is, how do you build your agents, for example? In this inte…
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In the past few years, technologies such as ChatGPT have changed the way we work. It has never been as easy to develop web applications as today, but …
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You could say Artificial Intelligence (AI) is eating the world. The problem is that often, you have to use an external service to leverage its benefit…
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In this post, I will introduce you to the concept of the pyramid of doom. Although the pattern is not typical anymore, it is good to know how you migh…
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If you have used this site earlier, you might have noticed it looks different now. That is because I did a massive rewrite of it. I had the following …
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In terms of development productivity, Continuous Integration (CI) has become a common technique across development teams across the world. In this ar…
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For a conference organizer, one of the hardest things to do is to keep your conference relevant. That is exactly the problem we faced with React Finla…
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As an open source developer of Node.js command line tools, you often have the question of which versions are being used and how. To solve the problem…
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Developing a full-blown web application, including a backend, can be quite an undertaking for a single developer or a small team. Several solutions ha…
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It's not uncommon for a normal JavaScript application to have thousands of dependencies. Once you start having multiple projects, the problem of havin…
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Building an online shop can be complex, and there are many factors to consider, not to mention compliance with all the different laws. To learn more …
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Developing content is hard work, and it takes consistent effort to become a successful content producer. To learn more about one approach, I am inter…
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Analytics is a big topic. What you don't know, you cannot optimize. To learn more about it, I am interviewing Steven Malone about Forage Analytics, a…
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Although React is a UI library, that doesn't mean you couldn't write full-stack applications around it. Frameworks, such as Next.js, have appeared to …
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One of the tricky parts of JavaScript is dealing with asynchronous behavior. The language itself has introduced improved syntax (async/await) and util…
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Developing your products is both exciting and challenging. There's both the business side and the development side to worry about and to manage. Both …
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For me, it's always amazing how complex infrastructure it's possible to configure these days. If you master a platform like AWS or GCP, you can do qui…
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When developing user interfaces with React, you often create a set of basic primitives. Another option is to consume them from a third-party library a…
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It's cool to write small web applications for the sake of learning. You can set the boundaries yourself and experiment with new technologies. Abhishe…
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If you look into what happened during the past few years in the world of JavaScript, you can see that component thinking made it to the mainstream. Ev…
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Preloading data is useful yet perhaps underused web development technique. When it comes to performance, the best work is the one you don't have to do…
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When you apply for a new position or a business case, often people want to see your CV (Curriculum Vitae). Although it sounds simple to create one, it…
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Doing a paper release of a book comes with additional thrill as once you go paper, there's no going back. Any mistakes you might have in the book are …
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Developing user interfaces with React tends to require effort and often it's done at the level of code. What if we could create user interfaces in the…
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Developing multi-platform applications is difficult. Thankfully the advent of JavaScript has made it a possibility for an increasing amount of develop…
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As you might know, configuring webpack isn't the most fun thing in the world and that's exactly the reason why I wrote a thick book about it. For man…
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Webpack 5 has been available for a couple of weeks by now. The previous release of the book covered majority of the required changes but I realized th…
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Testing is topic that comes up often in software development as it's an important part of verifying what we did works. That said, it's a complex topic…
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Setting up and maintaining a search on a static site is often a chore. You could handle indexing yourself using a solution like Lunr but even with tha…
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I've encountered many Ukrainian developers during my career and even visited the country a couple of times speaking at conferences. During each trip, …
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Static site generation is a topic that is becoming increasingly popular due to the rise of JAMStack. Instead of maintaining a server, the idea is to g…
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I recently received an interesting question from a reader that changed his career path and headed to technology. He mentioned he was getting overwhelm…
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There's a lot of excitement about machine learning and its applications. The question is, what can you do with and where to apply the technique and ho…
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What if you could create programs without coding? If you've ever used something like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, you've already done this at one…
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One of the great things about being a developer is that you can literally create your own tools to make it easier to do your work. Cyril Bois has bee…
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Webpack 5 is getting near and it felt like a good time to update the book. Although it's still in beta, it seems quite stable already and it's worth e…
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Serverless computing is one of those approaches that has taken the world by storm. The idea is to make computing a flexible resource you consume on-de…
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When developing APIs, you often get questions like how to combine and control data coming from different sources. That's where proxy-based approaches …
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Testing mobile applications is a tough topic as you have to worry about different devices, and the interaction model is challenging. Detox is a solut…
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Anything you don't measure or test, you cannot improve. The wisdom applies particularly to web as we develop our websites and applications. Without an…
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Given JavaScript dominates the world of web development, it has become a good target for malicious actors. Furthermore, the flexibility has led to a p…
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As a developer, font is something you end up using every day at your work. One year ago I teamed up with Andrey Okonetchikov and Marcus Sterz, to crea…
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Debugging JavaScript is one of those topics where people tend to be divided into two camps - those that console.log and those that use a debugger. In…
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Developing user interfaces can be complex as you have to think about different ways it's going to be used and you have to design patterns and componen…
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If there's something that has changed during the past few years, it's the way we develop user interfaces using JavaScript. Earlier we've learned about…
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If there's one web technology I never looked that much into, it's VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). In these times when privacy is more valued than eve…
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What is it like to grow an IT business? At least in my experience, it's not the easiest thing to do, and there are many things you have to get right t…
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Although tools like create-react-app (CRA) are great, they can at times be inflexible. They might provide great defaults but at the same time you lose…
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There's more than one way to code, and you'll find multiple programming styles. One aspect that's perhaps neglected sometimes is secure coding. To le…
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I was invited to CSSCamp 2019 (17.07) and JSCamp 2019 (18-19.07) by David Pich, the main organizer, to help out. I performed speaker interviews and a …
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Often learning a new programming language like ReasonML can be an arduous process as you have to set up the environment and tooling before you can beg…
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I was invited to WorkerConf 2019 (27-28.06) as a speaker. I also participated a workshop and went hiking after the conference. It was a small-scale co…
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If there's one thing that transformed my life, it's the adoption of the Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. The key part for me was to begin what's…
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When building web applications and sites using React, you have to think carefully about the user interface. You might either go with an established us…
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One of the developments that has began to change the way we style our applications and sites is the introduction of utility classes. Tailwind is an ex…
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Webpack is infamous for being a bundler that's not entirely easy to configure. That's one of the main reasons why I wrote the webpack book available o…
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I've had the chance to observe the evolution of the ReasonML ecosystem up close. For me, it seems to solve many pain points of the current JavaScript/…
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If you are dealing with microservices, you get questions like how to manage and orchestrate them. Vincenzo Chianese has come up with a solution desig…
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I was invited to typeof 2019 (27-29.03) as a speaker and a workshop instructor. It was a small-scale conference (about 200 people) held in Porto, Port…
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If there's one programming style I like a lot, it's functional programming. Although it's not the best fit for all problems, often having means to dec…
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If there's one thing developers have to deal with most of the days, it's APIs. For web developers, this often means dealing with HTTP and external ser…
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I've settled on using Emotion for styling my React applications. The API is close to styled-components and especially Emotion 10 is filled with functi…
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Often layouting a web page is an afterthought. Put a div here and there, sprinkle some CSS, and call it done. Perhaps you are more advanced and use CS…
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One of the unique aspects of the internet is that it makes us all equal in a strange way. What it means is that collaboration is possible on a new lev…
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Developers spend most of their time reading and understanding code. That said, not much has changed in the past decades in the way we do it. Perhaps t…
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When using webpack to bundle your project, it's important to keep an eye on the output. There are multiple tools for this purpose. Now there's also a …
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Although state management solutions like Redux have become the standard, at least with React, there's still room for innovation in the space. Sometim…
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Managing webpack configuration can get tough especially if you try to track best practices and optimizations. To address this problem, Jan Nicklas ha…
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2018 was mostly a consulting year for me. I also did travel within Europe and discovered countries such as Croatia and Armenia. It was my first year a…
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Usually, when you use webpack, you also have to set up its development server as well. Traditionally doing this hasn't been trivial and has required a…
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React has uses beyond application development. One of the perhaps surprising use cases is to integrate it within a Content Management System (CMS) suc…
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So far design and development have been considered separate disciplines. Recently tooling has begun to appear to bridge this gap. To understand more …
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I was invited to HalfStack London 2018 as a guest as we are considering bringing the conference series to Vienna. Therefore it was vital for me to get…
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It is exciting to organize a conference, especially when it's the first of its kind in a region. To learn more about one such event, I'm interviewing …
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I was invited to WebCamp Zagreb as a speaker and a workshop trainer. I gave one of my webpack workshops at the event and discussed static websites and…
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I was invited to WebExpo 2018 as a visitor since I spoke at the conference last year. Prague is one of my favorite cities in Europe, and the conferenc…
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It's difficult to write an application without side effects. Consider handling requests, dealing with third parties, managing storage for example. The…
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CSS is perhaps one of the most controversial parts of web development. For some, it's the favorite, for some the least pleasant part. As a result, man…
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Summer is over and I've made travel plans for the Fall. More details below. WebExpo - 21-23.09.2018 WebExpo 2018 I went to WebExpo last year for th…
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Let's say you are building a CMS or a blog with an admin interface. It won't take long until you want to upload files to your service. There are stand…
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Following the success of React Finland, we decided to organize another event this year. GraphQL Finland has a different scope, and it's going to be th…
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Even though the web started from content, it has transformed into an application platform. Approaches like Progressive Web Apps are a clear sign of th…
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You might be familiar with packages like Recompose that make it easier to compose components. Recompose is React-specific solution. What if there was …
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Summer is a great time to travel and see new places. So far I've scheduled three events for the Summer although more may appear depending on the publi…
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Tools like browserify and webpack popularized the idea of bundling. The idea is to transform your web application into a format that can be distribute…
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Although linting a project is a good technique to adopt, it comes with a cost as you have to wait for the linter to complete its work. Andrey Okonetc…
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Quite a bit has happened in the world of webpack. Most notably, the webpack reached version 4 recently. The purpose of this release of the book is to …
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In addition to writing and consulting, I do occasional training. Most often it's around my webpack book and it supports different levels of sessions w…
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I participated Concat 2018 at Salzburg this year. I held a four-hour webpack workshop with Tobias Koppers, the author of the tool, and visited the eve…
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If you develop JavaScript applications, you most likely use npm, the most famous package manager available for JavaScript. At the time of writing, it …
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State management is one of those topics that divides opinions. So far we've seen a couple of options so far. In this post, we'll cover Parket, a solu…
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One of the tricky things about writing React components meant for public consumption is making them compatible with various styling approaches used by…
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I was invited to AgentConf 2018 on its second iteration about a month ago as one of the organizers saw a presentation of mine about npm packaging. I g…
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One of the benefits of living in Vienna is that it's easy to reach central Europe and its conferences. Given Linz is close to Vienna (about 90 minutes…
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One of the core features of this site is custom syntax highlighting. I had to figure out ways to deal with custom syntax provided by Leanpub. Initiall…
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When you build a web application, you often have to communicate with a backend. It's not uncommon to do this using AJAX against a RESTful API. Logux …
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Servers, servers, servers. I've written a lot of Node.js servers since I began using it. Initially, I went through the API it provides but after a whi…
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Developing large scale applications requires a certain amount of discipline. Sometimes it is enforced by the environment; sometimes you have to apply …
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It was quite a year for me. You could say a life-changing one even. I visited at least ten countries in Europe, and most of them were new acquaintance…
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When you are writing applications, eventually you have to decide how to manage state. You can get far with React setState and lift the state in the co…
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There are a lot of React conferences these days. React has become one of the most popular web technologies during the past few years so this is unders…
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Redux Saga is famous for being easy to test but what if it could be even more comfortable. redux-saga-test-plan by Jeremy Fairbank was designed precis…
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Forms are a frequent topic in web development as we saw in the earlier interview about a-plus-forms. This time around, I'm interviewing Erik Rasmussen…
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Although using Redux is straight-forward once you understand the approach and its nuances, after a while it gets repetitive. It's easy to end up with …
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As discussed in the maintenance book, typing your code can be valuable in many ways. In part, it's about communication. Having the type information av…
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If you think about it, a lot of web development has something to do with forms. Every time you capture information, you most likely require a form. It…
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What do you do when you realize a book has become too big? You split it of course. The webpack book began to feel this way after the previous release …
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Testing is a lasting topic in software development. There are lots of tools, especially for JavaScript. In this interview, you'll learn about Cabbie, …
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Even though React API is small, the implementation is quite sizable due to all the work it does behind the façade. For this reason, people have develo…
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There are a lot of React events out there these days and it seems a new one appears every week somewhere around the world. To continue on the theme, …
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Testing React components is a constant topic. You can test through solutions like Jest or Enzyme. Or you could try something else like unexpected-reac…
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I was invited to WebExpo 2017 to discuss how I bootstrapped my business. Prague is one of the favorite cities of mine, so it was hard to say no. I'm h…
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Redux took the React world by a storm when it was introduced. The simple idea provided a guideline for the community and "solved" state management for…
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I had the privilege to participate in React Next 2017 as an invited speaker. Participation gave me a good chance to learn more about Israel and also a…
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React gives a lot of freedom by default. You can choose which libraries to use to complement it. Freedom comes with responsibility, though. Now you ar…
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Setting up a project can require a significant amount of effort if you want to control every single detail. This might be one reason why there are so …
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Since the early days of the web, people have wanted to visualize data to share with others. Even though the platform provides something basic for thes…
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Functional reactive programming allows us to think carefully about state and side effects. The question is, how to do that in JavaScript? Motorcycle.…
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Building universal web applications combining server side rendering with front-end is popular these days. The approach is not without its problems, th…
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Perhaps the greatest thing about React is how flexible it is. It contains some opinions but not too many. You still have plenty of freedom. Sometimes …
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Routing is one of those classic topics that comes up again and again. HTML5 History API itself is quite simple, but there are different opinions on ho…
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When you are using a library seriously, you will spend a lot of time with its documentation. It's one of those things that sets good libraries apart f…
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There's a lot of talk about universal web applications but developing them tends to be harder than it might sound. You will have to worry about the di…
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Perhaps one of my favorite webpack performance related tricks is setting up DLLs so that you avoid work. The problem is that maintaining the setup req…
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Design is difficult as you have to come up with a set of rules to describe it – a system. You don't always have to devise one yourself, and Material D…
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Even though I have traveled a lot this year already, it looks like more travel is in store. The travels so far have been valuable regarding experience…
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Releasing new versions of npm modules is an npm publish away. But how do you make sure you don't accidentally break a dependent project? Even if you a…
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Given JavaScript application source cannot be consumed easily through the browser "as is" just yet, the process of bundling is needed. The point is to…
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If there's one thing that divides web developers, it's styling. A part of this has to do with the different requirements of websites and web applicati…
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There's one pain most JavaScript developers share - dependency management. More specifically, how to keep them up to date. Sometimes even one month is…
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If there's one trend that has been nice to notice, it's the rise of reactive programming. You can see this in technologies like RxJS and cycle.js. To…
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There are plenty of events out there. What is it like to organize one? I know it's hard work based on what I've seen. To get more perspective, I'm in…
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Print on Demand services like KDP are ideal for self-publishers like me as they take a lot of pain out of the process. You don't have to worry about p…
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Even though software development is often seen from a technical perspective, there's a softer side to it. It is hard to avoid not having to work with …
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Data visualization is a big topic itself. When it comes to the web, D3 is perhaps the most well-known solution. Even though you can wrap it with React…
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Serialization, or the process of transforming data from a shape to another, is a common problem you encounter eventually when programming. Perhaps you…
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There are times when a vanilla ` or ` doesn't cut it. What if you want to do something more complex? Popper.js by Federico Zivolo achieves exactly th…
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It's time for another tour. This time around I'll be focusing on training. I have material specifically for webpack and React and this will be a good …
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Even though ES6 (ES2015) brought modules to the language, it missed one important thing - a loading method. Proper support is currently being implemen…
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In the beginning, there was a swamp, a hoe, and Jussi. Originally a large part of Finland was swamp and life were hard, but as Jussi worked on the swa…
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One common way to deal with asynchronous concerns (fetching for example) in React is to push the problem to a state manager or handling it through lif…
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Online tools are great for prototyping ideas and even workshops. You avoid the pain of setup while giving up some degree of control. Often this is a g…
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In this post, I will go through the biggest realizations gained in my Euro tour. I know it's a cliché thing to say, but trips like this grow you as a …
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Dealing with the asynchronous code has always been a challenge in JavaScript. Callbacks are the classic way, and since then we've gained higher level …
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Getting started with React can be daunting especially if you want to understand the entire setup. Solutions like create-react-app have hidden a lot of…
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YouTube and the web are filled with screencasts. They provide a great way to learn difficult concepts as you can see in practice how something specifi…
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Enough time has passed since the major release of the webpack book so it's a good time to evaluate how well it went. As no release is perfect, I've be…
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If there's something that's easy, it's making mistakes while coding JavaScript. Overlook one detail and you have a runtime error! One way to deal with…
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Even though you can get far with JavaScript's native functionality, eventually you'll find yourself writing little utilities to make it easier. For th…
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Here we go then. This is the big release I've been working towards for the past few months. Compared to the previous release this one is more polished…
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Micro-sized JavaScript libraries are a niche of their own. Often the idea is to use modern JavaScript APIs and expose them in an easier way. The earli…
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You know how rockstars tour to support their albums? Who is to say a book author could not do the same? Through a couple of coincidences, it looks li…
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What makes code good? How do you tell bad code from good one? Issues like this come to mind when you think about the concept of code quality. To get a…
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If the previous release was a big step, this is another one. By the looks of it, the final paper version will be around 450 pages. Don't worry, though…
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Compared to the previous release this one has gained more weight. The PDF version of the book is close to 400 pages due to new content and enhancement…
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Compared to the previous release we've proceeded a step or two closer towards paper. This time around in addition to the usual tweaks there are a coup…
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When it comes to testing, often you assert certain truths. At the very least you might have simple asserts sprinkled in your code. Or you might push …
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Describing what things are is an essential skill for a programmer. We might do that implicitly, but we often have to think about structure regardless.…
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You might have noticed that webpack 2 reached a final release. That means it's a good time to update this book as well. Even though it's mostly a main…
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A lot of people see isomorphic rendering as a holy grail given it gives advantages a SPAs lost compared to earlier solutions. The fact that you can pr…
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New year, new chance to write. The previous release put the writing gear back on and it's time to continue. This time around there are quite a big cha…
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Styling is one of those topics that's under flux. My React styling chapter alone covers quite a few approaches and Michele Bertoli's list has a lot mo…
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Alright, here we go again. It has been a while since the previous release and it's time for a big Winter update! Quite a bit has happened since. I sp…
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One of the cool things about React is that it managed to pull a lot of people into the component world. Even though there was initial resistance, the …
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If jQuery gave us proper control over the DOM, and React brought components to the limelight, what's next? Svelte by Rich Harris might be an answer to…
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It's almost funny how far a simple idea can fly sometimes. When writing my first book, I ran into the problem of configuring webpack. I prefer to keep…
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Comparing different JavaScript projects is surprisingly tough. This is a problem encountered by many developers daily. Most often it's the easiest to …
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Sometimes small is beautiful. Juha Lindstedt's FRZR, a 4kB view library, was a nice example of that as we saw earlier. This time we'll discuss evoluti…
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If you ask multiple React developers their styling approaches, you will also get multiple different answers. One trend is clear, though, the movement …
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I have chosen one approach when it comes to teaching JavaScript and related topics. Books are just a way amongst many others. Today I'm interviewing a…
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What's more fun than making applications with React? Making games of course! I remember coding Pong in Python (harder than it sounds) and writing a te…
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If there's one thing that has set React community apart, it's the focus on developer experience (DX). Historically developer tools haven't been the gr…
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Writing a little HTML table isn't particularly hard. It all gets more complex when you need logic like filtering, pagination, or fixed headers. A simp…
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If you have written a web application or site, you have had to deal with various assets like images, fonts, HTML, JavaScript code, whatnot. It's not a…
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It's interesting how JavaScript development proceeds in cycles. While a lot of people might be happy with the standard language, there are always some…
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Testing is a complicated topic. Just peppering your code with unit tests isn't often enough. You'll need something more, especially if you are develop…
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You might have heard about Mostly Adequate Guide to Functional Programming (in JavaScript) by Brian Lonsdorf. It's one of the better known free books …
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Given JavaScript is loosely typed, it can be amazingly productive language for prototyping. The problems begin once your project grows in complexity. …
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When developing front-ends, handling asynchronous behavior is always bit of a challenge. Yassine Elouafi's redux-saga provides one solution to this pr…
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If you have been using React, you have used one implementation of virtual DOM perhaps without thinking too much about it. It's one of those concepts t…
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Compared to the previous release this is a conservative release. There are certain bug fixes and content improvements, but no new chapters. The focus …
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As I lamented earlier this year, it's increasingly difficult to find npm packages. One way to describe this is npmopeia. The feeling that the package …
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It is tedious and boring to do the same thing over and over. That's where generator tools come in as they take some grunt work out of coding. Mikey by…
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It has been a while since the previous release and a lot has happened. In addition to ramping up my consulting and training business, I managed to pub…
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Builder by Formidable Labs is one of those projects tackling the boilerplate issue. It is a project that repurposes npm scripts into something more po…
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As I've been working towards splitting the first book, I realized I must do one more release of this webpack one before I can complete it. That's what…
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Boilerplate code is perhaps one of the leading causes of JavaScript fatigue. You often have to go through certain motions to set up a project or maint…
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npm alone has more than three thousand JavaScript boilerplates. Often it's easier to maintain your own than to use one designed by someone else. Every…
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One of the challenges of being a web developer is keeping up with the world. The field moves ahead constantly and it's easy to fail to see the forest …
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Compared to the first release a couple of weeks ago, this version has matured quite a bit. I've been reviewing the content with my editor (thanks Jesú…
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Often when you pick up a JavaScript library it's going to be a little chunky - tens, or even hundreds of kilobytes. Though this can be entirely accept…
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It has been a while since the previous release and quite a bit has happened. As you might have noticed, there's actually a new book about webpack out …
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Even though I've spent a lot of time with web development, I never really delved into the world of Content Management Systems (CMS). I'm of course awa…
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I'm currently in process of splitting up the big book (SurviveJS - Webpack and React). The split allows me to dig deeper in both topics. This book, Su…
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Given there's a lot going on in the React ecosystem, it can be difficult to keep up. Jeff Winkler maintains a service known as React.rocks to alleviat…
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More often than not, you are going to need a back-end for your application. Particularly RESTful APIs are popular. They are not the only choice, thoug…
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There is always some level of tension between getting things done and learning new technologies. A lot of the recent JavaScript fatigue stems from tha…
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People have been developing style guides for their sites and applications for quite a while. They define basic building blocks and aesthetics. This is…
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When I started this project roughly a year ago I had no idea how rewarding and demanding one it would be. Writing books is way harder than it sounds. …
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The previous release candidate prompted a nice amount of feedback. I've taken that into account in this release. I have a date for the final in sight …
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There has been talk of JavaScript fatigue. It's true the field is progressing fast. And as you move fast, it can be tiring for sure. Fortunately, as w…
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If the previous release candidate had few changes, this one is the opposite. I consider this good news as it's better to catch bigger issues now rathe…
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Not a lot has happened since the previous release candidate. The biggest change has to do with a little bug that the recent release of Babel 6.4 revea…
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Since the beta was launched, I've been working on remaining improvements. This has mostly meant tuning the existing content, although there are some n…
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Performing big changes to a codebase is always a little daunting. Doing each change by hand is time consuming and generally leads to errors, unless yo…
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I know the common wisdom is that you shouldn't write technical books. It's a difficult way to earn your income, especially when you live in a country …
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The long awaited 2.0 is getting very close. babel-plugin-react-transform reached version 2.0 last Wednesday. This was all I needed to push the book to…
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I remember, when a few years ago a friend asked me what JavaScript game engine to use. As a result, I set up a little gist that in turn lead to someth…
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This is perhaps the last release before the long awaited 2.0. Alt reached version 0.18. As a result a certain part of the book broke. I have fixed tha…
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It is amazing what a great year this turned out to be. I launched this site around July. Since then a lot has changed. While the situation might have …
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I discussed my React component boilerplate earlier on. It is focused and deals only with the frontend. Often you need more than just a frontend, thoug…
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It's time for another maintenance release with minor tweaks here and there. Probably the biggest change is the fancy new cover which I crafted based o…
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When people ask about what routing solution to use with React, they often get pointed at react-router. It is a powerful solution and used by many so i…
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You could say a lot has happened since the previous release. React 0.14 came out mere hours after it. React DnD gained 0.14 compatibility in its 2.0 r…
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I remember running into Baobab through Christian Alfoni's post about it. In short, it's a library that provides you optionally immutable data trees wi…
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If you try searching GitHub for React boilerplates, you'll find over thousand results. Nothing is harder than to agree on a standard boilerplate. As a…
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Bootstrap is easily one of the most popular CSS frameworks out there. Beyond grids and basic layout utilities, it provides a nice set of widgets to us…
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Compared to 1.8.0, 1.9.0 can be seen as a more conservative release. There are plenty of smaller fixes and even some new content too. I decided to fix…
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I ran into Christian Alfoni through his original blog early this year (2015). He had written a nice post about Webpack. That led me to provide a sever…
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It's always impressive when people take an idea and turn it into a concrete service. Andrew Ray did this with his ShaderFrog. It's a portal where you …
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If there's one thing that has been bubbling below for a couple of years now, it must be reactive programming. There have been solutions, such as RxJS …
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I remember seeing these strange webpack.config.js files in JavaScript projects for a long time. I didn’t give Webpack a good look until the promise of…
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We have once more new chapters in the book. I'm going to try a new model with these. For now the full versions of the testing and typing chapters will…
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Technological progress is both exhilarating and terrifying thing. And by the looks of it, it just keeps on progressing faster and faster. This has lea…
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I've written about book publishing earlier at my personal blog. It is an interesting yet difficult business. I sort of stumbled into the world by chan…
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Onwards we go. v1.7.5 can be characterized as a refinement release. I went through "React and Flux" and "From Notes to Kanban" with my editor (thanks …
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As React deals only with the view layer you will often have to complement it with something else. Flux architecture is one answer but not the only one…
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I skipped doing a public post for v1.6 as I was too tired (berry season is taxing). Now I'm going to give you release notes for both v1.6 and v1.7 at …
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As an author I like to keep an eye on the market. You have to know who you are against after all! It's not an understatement to say could that it's ab…
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Compared to the previous tagged release (v1.1.0, 10th of July) this new one (v1.5.0) is a monster. 274 commits went into it and nine contributors took…
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If you had to describe my approach to web design in one word the word would be scrappy. I rather get something to work fast than agonize on details. I…
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In my previous post I discussed some of the difficulties of related to technical publishing. I also presented a possible solution, a mixed model that …
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If there's one thing technical authors have in common, it's that they all want to help other people. The question is how to achieve that most effectiv…
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Given I'm a first time author I've done my fair share of mistakes with SurviveJS - Webpack and React. It was an attempt to change the direction of my …
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