How you can avoid overrides and live without the specificity hell — Over the years, developers have come up with various creative (and not so creative) ways to avoid the specificity hell. …

Creating and using SVG icon sprites in front end projects — There are two common ways to add icons to your page. The older — and still viable — method is to use a web font. Another way is to use SVG. Although SVG can be placed inside your HTML markup directly, it bloats the markup with unnecessary code, and isn’t…

It’s not as scary as they tell you, and it can be your friend — The JavaScript’s double-equals operator, ==, has been made into a boogeyman among the developers, both from within the community and without. This is because, historically, double-equals has had so-called quirks that, in some cases, make it do unexpected things. Many people, and the tools they make, would have you seal…

How to avoid managing state by taking advantage of the DOM — When React came out, it was the first framework that explicitly sold the idea of “view as function of state” to the masses. The idea was not novel by any means, but React certainly popularized it. Although it was possible to do with lower-level observables such as the one used…

Short checklist of things to take care of — I got my Lenovo ThinkPad P50 back after a long while. Given that I’m between jobs right now, I decided to set this machine up from scratch to play with it a bit. There are some things I always do when I set up a new Windows PC for web…

You don’t have to use controlled inputs or refs — When you read the official documentation on form handling in React, you encounter the examples of using controlled inputs. This gives most people an idea that that’s the way you must work with forms in React. …

Do not confuse bragging rights with success — The ability to handle complexity is praised and viewed as one of the key performance indicators. In many cases, this ability is evaluated as an important element of the programmer’s performance — be it formally as part of the performance review, or informally in the conversations among peers. As programmers…

A simpler way to do imperative code within React apps — Regardless of how good we are at writing React apps, we cannot entirely avoid coding against imperative interfaces. This is because the UI is fundamentally imperative, and so are the APIs in the browser. Controlling media elements is a common case, but we may also be dealing with 3rd party…

How to pick better class names for you HTML tags — I’ve recently been asked about what class names one should use. It’d been a long time since I last had to think about it, but it was a good refresher for me, and an opportunity to summarize my thoughts. I decided to jot down some notes about the topic in…