Technical
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29 articles from 2021 ยท show all
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
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
Variants โ 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.
February 2021
Reverse engineer a GraphQL API to automate love notes โ 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 ๐ค
A TypeScript trick for reusable hooks
Reusable hooks are all fun and games until TypeScript starts yelling at you about incompatible types.
React Bricks - visual blocks editor for NextJS #CodeWithSwiz 22
Tried a new visual editor for NextJS and CreateReactApp. Got a site up in 20min ๐ค
The Magic Function principle
Write functions, mostly magic.
January 2021
[CodeWithSwiz 21] useAuth beta support for Firebase ๐
It works! useAuth has beta-level support for Firebase Auth ๐ฅณ I did not expect that to take 3 sessions.
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.
[CodeWithSwiz 20] Adding Firebase support to useAuth, pt2
Firebase continues to be ๐ฉ. No wonder people keep asking for support in useAuth. Almost there โ๏ธ
[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?