Technical
314 articles ยท all categories
February 2025
A pattern for composable UI in Flask
Turn your unwieldy Flask codebase into manageable, composable fragments with this UI pattern. Very close to HTMX.
January 2023
Async React with NextJS 13
We look at React's native async support and how to use it in a NextJS 13 app. Learn how to use async components, parallel loading states, and caching with React.js and NextJS 13.
November 2022
Reader question: useReducer or XState?
Following up from my article about XState and Stately.ai, fellow reader S. asked if `useReducer` could ever be relevant when using state machines in React code. Yes! Here's how
When your brain is breaking, try Stately.ai
Two years ago I wrote about using XState after building a UI interaction so twisted my brain leaked out my ears. It helped. Now the creators have made something even better โ Stately.ai ๐
October 2022
Over-engineering tweet embeds with web components for fun and privacy
A way to embed tweets in static sites with full pre-renders and live updates using just 9kB of client-side JavaScript, 2 HTTP requests, and full reader privacy โ๏ธ
September 2022
useCallback is a code smell
One of my favorite ways to simplify and de-gotcha React code is to rip out all the useCallback and useMemo drama. 90% of the time you don't need it.
August 2022
Your code doesn't matter
"Your code doesn't matter" is something experienced programmers say, between the lines, when they sound like complete lunatics. But what do they mean? Why does everyone say it?
April 2022
Promise.allSettled, a wonderful tool for resilient code
The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures
March 2022
Saving time in UTC doesn't work and offsets aren't enough
Lessons from a painful outage with timezones, UTC offsets, and database clients that took a whole week to resolve.
A quick lesson in writing resilient code
On the backend anything can and will fail. How do you deal with that?
February 2022
A new VSCode extension makes state machines shine on a team
When you grok state machines, a new world of computational beauty and software design opens in front of your eyes. Things that used to be hard become easy. The impossible becomes possible. And you turn into that annoying team member.
December 2021
Small choices can wreck your codebase
wanna see the strangest looping construct I've found in production code?
November 2021
How defensive coding leads to bloat
Defensive coding is an important lesson and over time and engineers it leads to massive bloat, if you're not careful.
October 2021
How to configure Jest with TypeScript
Using plain Jest on a TypeScript codebase is kinda rough. No types in tests no thanks. Making Jest and TypeScript work together smoothly is something you do just rarely enough to forget the details. Hope this helps you and future me too โ๏ธ
September 2021
Anything's a sorting problem if you squint hard enough
What's the most algorithmically fun code you've written recently? ๐ค Here's mine: A dataviz using a grid of triangles that fits into the client's logo.
July 2021
You don't need a big team to automate your work
The opposite of folks who follow every FAANG trend and over-engineer their companies to death, are the folks who *never* take advice from the big boys.
React 18 and the future of async data
Friend, I have glimpsed the future and it is amazing. React 18 is shipping with Suspense and startTransition for deferred component rendering, but not data loading. That's coming in a future 18.x version.
June 2021
A surprising feature of JavaScript optional chaining
This blew my mind, thought you'd like it too. You can do more with ?. than you thought.
Use Netlify's _redirects on Gatsby Cloud
Something always goes wrong when you change hosting providers. ๐ For me it was redirects. A vital feature of any site migration.
A better React 18 startTransition demo
Demoing startTransition is hard. Modern computers are too fast ๐ โ Dan Abramov, a React core team member, helped me fix it up. Here's what I learned
Trying out React 18 Alpha
I read everything about React 18 Alpha, trawled through the work group, and ran some experiments. Here's what you'll wanna know.
A fun security bug with static rendering โ CodeWithSwiz #31
The flash of unlocked content is great fun for any paywall
May 2021
Build privacy-focused blazing fast tweet embeds โ CodeWithSwiz 30
Twitter embeds every tweet on your page as an iframe. Loads 1.2MB of JavaScript, makes 20+ HTTP requests and uses 100+ DOM nodes. ๐ฉ
Twitter embeds without JavaScript, pt1 โ #CodeWithSwiz 29
Continuing our quest for better Lighthouse scores, more reader privacy, and less JavaScript we attacked the next biggest culprit ๐ Twitter.
March 2021
Your serverless questions, answered
When talk comes to serverless, engineers have lots of questions. Here are some answers ๐
Go full-stack in 5min with your first cloud function
How *do* you build a JavaScript function that runs in the cloud serverlessly? Here's how to get started with Vercel, Netlify, or AWS Lambda
Can you automate love?
What's the laziest thing you've ever built? For me it's a bot that sends cute pictures every day
If you can JavaScript, you can backend
When you think of a backend or server developer, who comes to mind? A wizard of arcane magics. The future belongs to full-stack frontend engineers.
That time serverless melted my credit card
Serverless is pretty cheap. But you *can* get it wrong.
Why serverless fits side-projects perfectly
How do you provision servers for no load most days THEN ALL THE LOAD THIS MINUTE? That's how side-projects work and it's hard