One framework that has gained popularity in recent years is Flutter, a framework for building cross-platform mobile applications. While working on a mobile app side hustle, I decided to dive into Flutter and learn how to use it. I’ve decided to share some small and easily digestible lessons along the…

While working on software systems and products we often find ourselves having to make choices between naive solutions (cheap) and solidly engineered solutions (expensive). It’s a balancing act. On one side, we don’t want to underestimate the complexity of the solution and provide a solution that underperforms and disappoints. On…

Launching a new software product or feature can be super scary but it’s also one of the most rewarding feelings you can obtain working in a software team. — “Hope for the best, plan for the worst” — this quote is from a series of books by Lee Child where the protagonist Jack Reacher gets caught up in far-fetched conspiracies and manages to save the day every. single. time. But let’s not shoot down the wisdom of this maxim…

Looking for a way to simplify your Redux app? — I’m sure you had a similar experience to what I had when I first started using Redux. You checked it out a bit, got excited by it’s elegance, and then asked: Where do I put async logic like talking to a server? In this article, we’ll compare two options for…

One of the most important shortcuts in any text editor, the good ‘ol jump to file shortcut. In Visual Studio Code (on macOS), this shortcut is ⌘+P. It mostly works like expected, you just start typing a file’s name, and select it when you see it. But I noticed that…

Although this article will expound on using this strategy with React components, it makes sense in any ES6 project where you want to have multiple subclasses provide configuration data to a super class in the form of static props. In a React project I’m working on, we had a bunch…

While talking to developers who haven’t used WebSockets yet, they usually have the same concern: how do you scale it out across multiple servers? Publishing to a channel on one server is fine, provided all subscribers are connected to that one server. As soon as you have multiple servers, you…

This post isn’t heavy on React, so the core concepts should translate easily to other view frameworks like Vue and Angular. That said, for the rest of the post, I’ll assume you are using React or React-Native. So you need to make your app respond to events from the server…

This article is about an approach that I recently dealt with to handle a scenario where I had a stream of events (user drawing on the canvas) which I had to process (send over socket.io to a server). I wanted the ability to pause the syncing process when the socket…