Swizec's technical articles

Swizec's articles in the "technical" category

I aim to write mindblowing emails with real insight into the career and skills of a modern software engineer. "Raw and honest from the heart!" as one reader described them.

Below are 294 articles filed under technical. Enjoy ❤️

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.
January 14th, 2023

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
November 11th, 2022

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 – Stately.ai 😍
November 8th, 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 ✌️
October 26th, 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.
September 16th, 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?
August 16th, 2022

Promise.allSettled, a wonderful tool for resilient code

The pros and cons of different approaches to writing resilient code that handles partial failures
April 4th, 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.
March 25th, 2022

A quick lesson in writing resilient code

On the backend anything can and will fail. How do you deal with that?
March 21st, 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.
February 25th, 2022

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.
November 15th, 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 ✌️
October 19th, 2021

Anything's a sorting problem if you squint hard enough

What's the most algorithmically fun code you've written recently? 🤔 Here's mine: A dataviz using a grid of triangles that fits into the client's logo.
September 7th, 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.
July 27th, 2021

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.
July 22nd, 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.
June 24th, 2021

Use Netlify's _redirects on Gatsby Cloud

Something always goes wrong when you change hosting providers. 😅 For me it was redirects. A vital feature of any site migration.
June 23rd, 2021

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.
June 11th, 2021

A fun security bug with static rendering – CodeWithSwiz #31

The flash of unlocked content is great fun for any paywall
June 1st, 2021

Build privacy-focused blazing fast tweet embeds – 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. 💩
May 12th, 2021

Twitter embeds without JavaScript, pt1 – #CodeWithSwiz 29

Continuing our quest for better Lighthouse scores, more reader privacy, and less JavaScript we attacked the next biggest culprit 👉 Twitter.
May 4th, 2021

Your serverless questions, answered

When talk comes to serverless, engineers have lots of questions. Here are some answers 😊
March 29th, 2021

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
March 18th, 2021

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
March 17th, 2021

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.
March 16th, 2021

That time serverless melted my credit card

Serverless is pretty cheap. But you *can* get it wrong.
March 12th, 2021

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
March 10th, 2021

How a $12 AWS bill powers a $50k business

my point is that running server code on the web has become ridiculously cheap *and* easy
March 9th, 2021

Variants – a quick tip for better React components

Reusable components like to grow boolean props for different situations and complexity soon blows up. Variant props are the perfect solution.
March 2nd, 2021

Reverse engineer a GraphQL API to automate love notes – CodeWithSwiz 24

We used a man-in-the-middle attack to snoop an app's API traffic, replayed it in a GraphQL client, and successfully put it inside an AWS Lambda 🤘
February 23rd, 2021

A TypeScript trick for reusable hooks

Reusable hooks are all fun and games until TypeScript starts yelling at you about incompatible types.
February 19th, 2021

React Bricks - visual blocks editor for NextJS #CodeWithSwiz 22

Tried a new visual editor for NextJS and CreateReactApp. Got a site up in 20min 🤘
February 9th, 2021

The Magic Function principle

Write functions, mostly magic.
February 5th, 2021

[CodeWithSwiz 21] useAuth beta support for Firebase 🎉

It works! useAuth has beta-level support for Firebase Auth 🥳 I did not expect that to take 3 sessions.
January 26th, 2021

Tech interview best practice that fails in life

Tech interviews have a magic answer: The hashmap. And it's not always best on the job.
January 22nd, 2021

[CodeWithSwiz 20] Adding Firebase support to useAuth, pt2

Firebase continues to be 💩. No wonder people keep asking for support in useAuth. Almost there ✌️
January 19th, 2021

[CodeWithSwiz 19] Firebase Auth support in useAuth, pt1

Support for Firebase Auth is one of the most requested features for useAuth and I figured what the heck, how hard can it be?
January 12th, 2021

SSR, SSRwR, SSG, CSR, WTFBBQ???

These abbreviations are getting out of hand. It's like a bad interviewer's wet dream.
November 24th, 2020

Gatsby to NextJS pt1, server-side-render or server-side-generate?

Gatsby and NextJS do similar things differently. One is better for websites, the other for webapps. In episode 17 of CodeWithSwiz we explore the biggest difference.
November 19th, 2020

Use private libraries to cleanup your codebase

You're using the many-small-repositories approach to work faster as a team. But where do you put shared code? How do you make it nice to use? How to publish and install private packages?
November 16th, 2020

React context without context, using XState – CodeWithSwiz 14, 15

useAuth works without React Context! 🎉 here's how
November 10th, 2020

Swap useReducer with XState – CodeWithSwiz 13

In Refactoring a useReducer to XState we talked about a 5 step process to turn a reducer into an XState state machine. Today answers "Ok now what?"
October 22nd, 2020

How to write tests for XState – CodeWithSwiz 12

Once you know how to refactor a useReducer to XState, you gotta prove you did it right.
October 13th, 2020

Refactoring a useReducer to XState, pt1 – CodeWithSwiz 11

XState promises to be like useReducer+Context combined and the simplest way to handle complex state in React apps. But can it deliver? On this episode of #CodeWithSwiz, we gave it a shot.
October 8th, 2020

Prefetch data with React Query and NextJS – CodeWithSwiz 8, 9

Prefetching lets you start React apps without loading spinners. Gatsby introduced this concept with `staticQuery`, react-query and NextJS make the pattern easier 😍
September 30th, 2020

Modern backend is a JavaScript function

Many engineers think server-side code is the scary domain of True Engineers. Something newbies, juniors, and frontend engineers shouldn't touch. They're wrong. Modern backend is a joy. ❤️
September 22nd, 2020

Using JavaScript to commit to Github – CodeWithSwiz 7

Update code with a JavaScript function? Easier than you think 😍
September 17th, 2020

Why NextJS /api routes are fab – CodeWithSwiz 6

In this episode of CodeWithSwiz, we tried NextJS's support for /api routes – code running on the backend. In a word – Wow
September 13th, 2020

Exploring NextJS with a headless CMS, pt4 – CodeWithSwiz

NextJS getStaticProps, environment vars, and why you shouldn't use yarn link – all in this episode of #CodeWithSwiz
September 10th, 2020

Exploring NextJS with a custom CMS, pt3 – CodeWithSwiz

Friend, this episode of #CodeWithSwiz was a great example of why you want to start using TypeScript and how thermal load *destroys* computers.
September 8th, 2020

Building a small CMS with NextJS, pt2 – CodeWithSwiz

You're the computer, the CMS is your script. Starting small, trying NextJS, comparing microbundle vs. parcel for extracting libraries out of projects.
September 3rd, 2020

Your first NextJS app – CodeWithSwiz

On CodeWithSwiz ep2, we tried NextJS and built our first tiny app. Complete with a design system, static rendering, React Query to talk to AWS Lambda, and deployed to live 🤘
September 1st, 2020

CodeWithSwiz: Privacy-focused embeds for YouTube, Twitter, et al

A new old experiment 👉 regular livecoding. It's like a podcast with video, show notes, regular cadence, and we both learn something new.
August 27th, 2020

You though computer science has no place in webdev? Here's a fun coding challenge

August 21st, 2020

How to debug unified, rehype, or remark and fix bugs in markdown processing

August 17th, 2020

When your brain is breaking, try XState

August 10th, 2020

In 2020's, what is "frontend"? 🤨

"He's a frontend guy, is this even a fair question to ask?" The head of engineering was worried about our systems design question …
August 7th, 2020

Why react-hook-form is my new favorite form library

August 3rd, 2020

Path dependence or why existing code always looks bad

July 6th, 2020

Build a new design system in a couple afternoons

July 3rd, 2020

Wormhole state management

June 29th, 2020

Using scopes for elegant JAMStack permissions

June 15th, 2020

Screw web performance, just wait a little 😈

May 22nd, 2020

Add granular role-based access to your JAMStack app

May 18th, 2020

Don't be weird

May 8th, 2020

The 3 types of scalability

May 1st, 2020

Why you should build a form generator

Lemme guess, every project involves 1 or 2 forms and they're all the friggen same. You got forms coming out the wazoo. Render fields. Connect to state. Add field validation. Detect submit. Add form validation. Send fetch request. Repeat.
April 27th, 2020

How tests uncover hidden complexity in simple code

April 14th, 2020

The surprising performance boost from changing gif embeds

April 6th, 2020

How you can start using GraphQL today without changing the backend

GraphQL for new projects looks great ... buuuut how do you use it with that old backend cobbled together in Rails over the last bazillion years?
March 12th, 2020

Mocking and testing fetch requests with Jest

February 28th, 2020

How serverless beats servers

January 28th, 2020

How GraphQL blows REST out of the water

Let's have a look at hyow GraphQL makes queries so much easier and more pleasant than REST
January 23rd, 2020

Famous last words: Pfft, that's easy

January 10th, 2020

A promises gotcha that will catch you out

December 16th, 2019

How I answer the door with AWS Lambda and Twilio

December 8th, 2019

Towards a Gatsby+Suspense proof-of-concept

November 11th, 2019

Sometimes your worst code is your best code

November 8th, 2019

Experimenting with the new React Concurrent mode

November 6th, 2019

Is hot dog taco?

What if I told you modern tools let you build and launch a small webapp in 30 minutes? Complete with SSL, a .com domain, a database, a documented API, CDN hosting, fast static initial loads, and a hydrated SPA? That's the challenge I posed at Silicon Valley Code Camp this weekend. The audience didn't believe me, so it was time to perform some magic. 🧙
October 21st, 2019

That time monkey patching took 2 days off my life

October 14th, 2019

REST API best practice in a GraphQL world

GraphQL is taking the world by storm and it is wonderful. But in the real world, you're still dealing with REST APIs aren't you?
September 30th, 2019

Moving 13 years of Wordpress blog to Gatsby Markdown

September 23rd, 2019

What happens when you push AWS credentials to GitHub

September 13th, 2019

useReducer + useContext for easy global state without libraries

August 12th, 2019

useAuth – the simplest way to add authentication to your React app

August 9th, 2019

Better engineer or More Effective engineer?

July 29th, 2019

A short lesson in debugging complex systems

July 26th, 2019

The day I crashed production 4 times

July 19th, 2019

The unreasonable difficulty of adding a feature to a Textarea

July 15th, 2019

A whole new level of technical decision

July 8th, 2019

How to drive React state with D3 transitions for complex animation

July 1st, 2019

A Drilldown Piechart with React and D3

June 28th, 2019

TypeScript's biggest flaw and how you can use ducks to fix it

June 17th, 2019

Is JavaScript really getting too complex?

June 10th, 2019

Getting the CSS out of rendered React components

June 3rd, 2019

TypeScript for serverless lambda backends 👌

A few months ago I inherited a Kotlin project. It was an unfinished prototype and all I had to do was wrap it up and deploy. Every time I touched the project, it broke. Nothing worked. Wouldn't run on my machine, wouldn't read API requests, couldn't get tests working, if I changed some code I broke it all. That's when I realized learning a new field is super hard
May 27th, 2019

Just for fun 👉 React vs. jQuery vs. Svelte, same 🐱 app

I was bored Monday night and decided to see if I still know how to build with jQuery. Nothing better to do, no pressing ideas, a bit of fun. Also a favor for a friend who's preparing to talk about React to a bunch of people who've never seen it before 😛
May 24th, 2019

Svelte takes the best of React and the best of Vue to make something awesome

May 20th, 2019

The Phoenix Project recap

May 19th, 2019

LOLCODE-to-JavaScript compiler babel macro

A fully functioning LOLCODE-to-JavaScript compiler implemented as a Babel macro. You never thought you wanted this and now here it is. You're welcome. 🐱
May 16th, 2019

The web moves fast, how do you keep up?

May 7th, 2019

comp sci ain't useless

May 1st, 2019

Build better software with The Theory of Constraints

April 29th, 2019

Finally, a practical use case for JavaScript generators!

JavaScript generators are amazing. They let you write infinite loops that terminate. Yield values from functions before they finish … and I bet you've never used a JavaScript generator even once did you? I FOUND A USE! A real world practical use-case where generators make your code better. 😱
April 17th, 2019

Serverless Chrome on AWS Lambda, the guide that works in 2019 and beyond

April 11th, 2019

Custom markdown extensions with Remark and HAST handlers

April 8th, 2019

Trying the new ResizeObserver and IntersectionObserver APIs

April 3rd, 2019

BrowserStack – a less painful way to test weird browsers

March 20th, 2019

Fixing laggy UI with React.memo

March 18th, 2019

useDimensions – a React Hook to measure DOM nodes

March 13th, 2019

Learning a new field is super hard, I get it now 😅

March 11th, 2019

Why dataviz does better for your career than TODOapps

March 6th, 2019

Behind the curve ... of my bar donut chart 🤨

March 5th, 2019

JavaScript’s most popular dataviz library

February 26th, 2019

Dinosaurs, software engineers, and cholera. What do they have in common?

February 25th, 2019

An experiment to merge React and Vue

February 20th, 2019

Custom react hooks ❤️

February 11th, 2019

Async, await, catch – error handling that won't drive you crazy

February 8th, 2019

React, D3, and hooks 👉special livecode tonight 9:30pm

February 6th, 2019

Why CSS-in-JS is winning, an example

January 30th, 2019

Tooltips and state across various d3 charts in a React dashboard!

January 28th, 2019

How to set up Gatsby and Auth0 for easy authentication on your next project

January 23rd, 2019

Delightful state management with hooks and Constate

January 16th, 2019

How to build a Remark plugin to supercharge your static site

January 9th, 2019

DRY is a footgun, remember to YAGNI

January 7th, 2019

How to use React Context effectively

January 2nd, 2019

Tooltips ... tooltips are not so easy 🧐

December 10th, 2018

Building a React dataviz with React hooks

December 6th, 2018

Oh the things you can learn with a fun weekend hack project 🏗

November 19th, 2018

Waiting for Godot with callbacks, promises, and async

November 16th, 2018

Some life advice I learned from computer science

November 12th, 2018

Announcing D3blackbox and useD3

November 6th, 2018

Easy D3 blackbox components with React hooks

November 1st, 2018

React hooks in a nut shell 🥐

October 29th, 2018

Making a Node CLI both global and local

October 15th, 2018

The most frustrating debugging experience I've had all year

August 28th, 2018

How virtual memory saves lives, workshops, and your sanity

August 21st, 2018

Build responsive SVG layouts with react-svg-flexbox

August 17th, 2018

ReactVR/react-360 is great, but maybe not quite there yet

August 3rd, 2018

Answering some common questions about React + D3 2018

August 2nd, 2018

Creating the perfect rounded edge with D3 curves

July 31st, 2018

Building a filterable log viewer with Downshift and match-sorter

July 18th, 2018

Hire these interns

July 10th, 2018

Upgrading to Gatsby v2 with the help of the hivemind 👌

June 26th, 2018

Intern process part 2 – (my first) webinar, about React context

June 14th, 2018

Use ref callbacks to measure React component size

June 7th, 2018

Tiny React & D3 flamegraph tutorial

June 6th, 2018

Build an animated pure SVG dynamic height accordion with React and D3

June 1st, 2018

Towards a WebRTC mesh network with RTCDataChannel

May 30th, 2018

Learning WebRTC peer-to-peer communication, part 2 – connecting 2 browsers on different devices

May 16th, 2018

Learning WebRTC peer-to-peer communication, part 1

May 7th, 2018

Declarative D3 charts with React 16.3

April 27th, 2018

Using YouTube as a data source in Gatsbyjs

April 24th, 2018

Blockchain-redux becomes useful, part 1

April 3rd, 2018

How our engineering team got 12x faster using these 5 lessons about integrating 3rd-party services

March 15th, 2018

Build a Chrome extension from idea to launch in an afternoon

March 13th, 2018

Benchmarking Vue

March 5th, 2018

Make your things pretty with chroma-js

March 2nd, 2018

Seamlessly render a Preact component in a React project

February 28th, 2018

Building an interactive DOM benchmark, preliminary results

February 27th, 2018

Loops are the hardest

February 15th, 2018

3 key insights that make D3.js easy to learn

February 8th, 2018

Fade in lazy loaded images with React and CSS – a quick guide

January 31st, 2018

How to populate react-redux-form with dynamic default values

January 25th, 2018

How to setup Gocommerce on a new Digital Ocean droplet

January 23rd, 2018

Always put side effects last

January 10th, 2018

Blockchain Redux experiment, part 2

January 4th, 2018

Advent of Code Day 24 – The A* Algorithm, I think

December 25th, 2017

Advent of Code Day 22 – Sporifica Virus

December 22nd, 2017

Advent of Code Day 20 – Particle Swarm

December 20th, 2017

Advent of Code Day 19 – A Series of Tubes

December 19th, 2017

A blockchain-backed Redux clone in 105 lines of code

December 18th, 2017

Advent of Code Days 17 & 18 – Spinlocks and Interpreters

December 18th, 2017

Advent of Code Day 15 – Dueling JavaScript Generators

December 15th, 2017

Advent of Code Day 14 – Disk Fragmentation

December 14th, 2017

Advent of Code Day 13, Packet Scanners

December 13th, 2017

How to DDoS yourself with analytics –– a war story

November 29th, 2017

Livecoding 52: First impressions of Vue

November 20th, 2017

Arcane JavaScript knowledge still useful

November 17th, 2017

How to add real web push notifications to your webapp

You've probably seen web notifications before. YouTube shows them when it goes to a new song, Facebook pings them when a new message comes in, scammy websites ask for permissions and you say no. The usual. You can fire those notifications from anywhere inside your JavaScript.
November 16th, 2017

After a week I must begrudgingly admit VSCode is a better editor than Emacs

November 10th, 2017

Livecoding 51: I did it! My first PR to a big OSS project \o/

November 9th, 2017

My love letter to Prettier

November 8th, 2017

Livecoding Recap 50: How newbie mistakes kill the flow

November 6th, 2017

Why I won't be switching to VSCode any time soon

November 3rd, 2017

That one time a simple for-loop increased conversions by 19%

October 20th, 2017

Livecoding Recap 48- Why contributing to big opensource projects is still hard

October 9th, 2017

Livecoding Recap 48: JavaScript async/await and Morty's Mindblowers

October 2nd, 2017

Server-side rendering a D3 chart with React 16

September 28th, 2017

Livecoding Recap 47: Webpack build progress indicator for Mac Touchbar

September 18th, 2017

How JavaScript linters cause bugs

I was doing code review for a coworker, and it soon became obvious that he used a linter and that the linter gave him a bright idea: _use strict comparisons_.
September 14th, 2017

Livecoding Recap #46: 3D is hard, WebAR defeats me

September 11th, 2017

Livecoding Recap #45: Almost building a ballistic missile with React and AR.js

September 4th, 2017

How you can translate any random D3 example to React

August 31st, 2017

Livecoding Recap #44: Dipping my toes in AR.js

August 28th, 2017

The two ways to build a zoomable dataviz component with d3.zoom and React

August 25th, 2017

How to think of your business logic as data

August 11th, 2017

Livecoding recap #43: A landing page for React + D3v4

August 8th, 2017

How I reverse-engineered Hacker News

August 3rd, 2017

Livecoding recap #42: HackerNews app where people are nice

July 10th, 2017

Livecoding recap #41: Towards declarative 3D scenes with React and Three.js

June 20th, 2017

Livecoding recap #40: react-navigation with React Native

June 12th, 2017

Exploring the AST with Babylon and Prettier

June 8th, 2017

Livecoding #39: Towards an AI that writes JavaScript

June 5th, 2017

Do you really need immutable data?

May 24th, 2017

Livecoding #38 - A faux AI that writes JavaScript

May 22nd, 2017

Here's why you should never implement your own caching

April 13th, 2017

Livecoding #37- Building a real life color picker

April 11th, 2017

A Fast Mutex Lamport Lock with JavaScript Promises

March 30th, 2017

Time is funny in Ruby

March 29th, 2017

The Internet is a Beautiful Place in the World's Most Exclusive Chatroom

March 24th, 2017

N-body Collision Simulation with React, D3, and MobX

March 16th, 2017

Livecoding #35 - A New Site for reactd3js.com

March 13th, 2017

Livecoding #34: A Map of Global Migrations, Part 3

February 20th, 2017

Declarative `canvas` Animation with React and Konva

February 16th, 2017

Livecoding #33: A Map of Global Migrations, Part 2

February 13th, 2017

Livecoding #32: A Map of Global Migrations, Part 1

February 7th, 2017

It ain't stupid if it works

February 1st, 2017

Livecoding #31: Wherein we learn that datasets are hard and find 2 good papers

January 30th, 2017

Yet another hard lesson about time

January 19th, 2017

Livecoding #30: Dipping my toes in React Native

January 17th, 2017

Animating 2048 SVG nodes in React, Preact, Inferno, Vue, Angular 2, and CycleJS – a side-by-side comparison

December 21st, 2016

Livecoding #29: Optimizing React choropleth map rendering

December 19th, 2016

Using HOCs to DRY up your code

December 16th, 2016

If the first page of The Martian was written in different type systems

December 15th, 2016

Dancing tree fractal with React

December 13th, 2016

Fun surprise: UglifyJS can't ES6

December 7th, 2016

Livecoding #28: Productizing the door-answering Slack bot, Part 1

December 5th, 2016

One awkward thing about MobX: Complex models

December 2nd, 2016

Do you even need that bind?

November 29th, 2016

Livecoding #27: New React Indie Bundle page almost done

November 21st, 2016

Fractals in React

November 18th, 2016

Fast, searchable dropdown inputs with React

November 16th, 2016

I made a python script that converts SVG to React ?

November 15th, 2016

Livecoding #26: A new page for a new React Indie Bundle

November 14th, 2016

Modeling time in React

November 9th, 2016

How to structure your MobX app for the real world

November 4th, 2016

A tiny ES6 fetch() wrapper that makes your life easier

November 2nd, 2016

How to waste hours of life with fetch() and a bit of brainfart

Both superagent and fetch() enable you to talk to a server. The first produces clean code that gets nesty if you need many things. The second produces clean code that is Promis-y and sometimes cumbersome. The difference between superagent and fetch() isn't that one sends your headers as-given and the other lowercases their names. The difference is that superagent sends a cookie and fetch() doesn't!
November 1st, 2016

Livecoding #25: Adding MobX to a vanilla React project

October 31st, 2016

Simple MobX-driven modals

October 28th, 2016

How to use MobX with create-react-app

October 27th, 2016

Histogram in D3v3 vs D3v4

October 25th, 2016

CSS classes don't work the way you think they work

October 21st, 2016

How to make Slack and Twilio talk to each other

October 18th, 2016

A trick to make your big dataviz load super fast

October 17th, 2016

Tying place names to county names with geonames.org

October 4th, 2016

Livecoding #24: A choropleth in React.js

October 3rd, 2016

Chrome's console.log is the slowest

September 28th, 2016

Livecoding #23: Slackbots and OAuth

September 26th, 2016

Backbone → React: Handling state with MobX

September 22nd, 2016

Backbone → React: it's a people problem after all ?

September 21st, 2016

Backbone → React – Step 1

September 20th, 2016

Livecoding #22: A door-answering Slackbot

September 19th, 2016

Firefox is slow, Lodash is fast

September 16th, 2016

Object clone performance: preliminary results

September 15th, 2016

A puzzle in JavaScript objects

This is a puzzle you can run into if you’re not careful, and sometimes, despite your best efforts, even if you are careful. It happened to me when I had a settings object that I passed into a view. The view then did things. When I made a new view from the settings object, it looked like the view I had just cleared.
September 9th, 2016

Senior Mindset Book