A slightly different approach — Webpack-dev-server is an excellent utility for quickly building client-side applications. With hot module replacement out of the box, development becomes are breeze. ⚡️ But things are not always 🌈 and 🦄 though… Those using webpack-dev-server usually fall into two categories: Developers building client-only applications that don’t interact with APIs exposed…

Do something with your webpage when your user switches tabs — The Page Visibility API provides us a means to know whether the user of our webpage is actively viewing the page or has moved the page to the background, by either switching tabs or minimizing the window. MDN has a really good explanation for the API, The Page Visibility API…

Using react-input-trigger — Most editors and writing apps, including Medium here, provide some means to reference other users on their platform. A common pattern that a lot of applications use (Github, Slack, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, etc) is suggesting users to the writer whenever the writer starts typing with the at symbol —…

Web applications today rely heavily on dropdown menus to de-clutter the user interface — by stowing away additional non-critical options inside menus that you can trigger by hovering over or by clicking on an icon. This article is a quick guide on building dropdown menus like 👆. We’ll be building…

Full Disclosure: Testing is something I have just begun delving into. This is more of a TIL post; something that I feel might be useful to someone looking for answers to what I had run into. 😄 For some context, I was trying to test my express routes using Jest…

Change the way you interact with Objects — Proxies are Middleware for Javascript Objects … or at least that’s sort of the tl;dr version for it. Proxies were introduced in ES6 to allow you to provide custom functionality to basic operations that can be performed on an Object. For example, get is a basic Object operation. const obj…

Handle your users’ online and offline status — For those who have had to build real-time applications on a tight schedule, Firebase has definitely been in your radar. It is easily the best real-time-database-as-a-service (RTDbaaS? 😛) that I’ve used. And now with the introduction of Firestore, Firebase’s new database offering, we have access to all the real-time…

A quick-start guide to Redux’s underused feature! — There is no denying the impact that Redux has had on the React (and even Angular) landscape. Over the years, it has cemented its position as one of the most popular state management libraries. That being said, an aspect of Redux that is sometimes underused is its support for middleware. …

Stop your dev teams from losing knowledge — We’ve all been through this… You’ve joined a new organisation. You’ve been given your first task. You sift through this alien codebase searching for the section that is relevant to your task … and then you see some code that seems off/hack-y. 🤔 Why was it done this way? …