Fullstack Web is the bastard child of web development. BigTech frowns on its lack of specialization, everyone else drowns in its complexity. But it runs the web.
Learning from tutorials is great! You follow some steps, learn a smol lesson, and feel like you got this. Then you go into an interview, get a question from the boss, or encounter a new situation and o-oh.
Shit, how does this work again? 😅
That's the problem with tutorials. They're not how the world works. Real software is a mess. A best-effort pile of duct tape and chewing gum. You need deep understanding, not recipes.
Leave your email and get the Fullstack Web Essays series - a series of curated essays and experiments on modern Fullstack Web development. Lessons and insights learned from practice building production software.
Curated Fullstack Web Essays
Get a series of curated essays on Fullstack Web development. Lessons and insights from building software for production. No bullshit.
Latest Fullstack Web articles from Swizec
The anatomy of a React Island
A coworker asked how React Islands work and I realized it's a technique I've been using to modernize monolithic web codebases for years, but never wrote down how it works.
A few thoughts on tRPC
Discover tRPC's potential in building end-to-end type safe RPC APIs in this insightful blog post. Perfect for developers seeking innovative solutions for server-client separation in webapp development.
Why PATCH endpoints matter
A painful lesson from production that brought several engineers almost to tears: *Please* add PATCH endpoints to your public APIs.
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 ✌️
Move your business logic into data
The quickest way to simplify a complex function with lots of logic is to turn it into data. A lesson from production
You are allowed to invent HTTP status codes
A fun problem for RESTful APIs: Did you get 404 because your URL is wrong or because the resource wasn't found?
Better tooling won't fix your API
RESTful APIs are like Agile – everyone does it differently and if it isn't working, it's your fault for doing it wrong. 🤨
How JAMStack helps you ship
Common problem in engineering teams: Stepping on each other's toes. JAMStack can help.
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
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 …
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
It's never been this easy to build a webapp
We live in exciting times my friend. It's never been this easy to build a webapp and make your first $1,000/month.
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. 🧙
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.
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!