Hey friends 👋

Our social media habits are getting out of control, and we need to talk about it, so let’s cut to the chase.

tl;dr Block Twitter, have a dedicated work computer, download Twizzle.

But please read on, because it’s not that simple.

Quitting social media

A few years ago I deleted my Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn accounts, in an attempt to do a digital declutter. It’s going well so far. Yes, you can tell yourself stories about how you still have Facebook because you want to “connect” with people, but you know damn well that you have chat groups for your close family members and friends, so what’s the fucking point of still connecting with Becky from high school when you hated her anyway? I reached my 5000 friends limit when I had Facebook, and in reality, I had around 3 friends in total. …

Hey friends 👋

It’s been a long time since I have written something here, but I don’t want to write articles for the sake of “keeping the blog alive”, screw that.

Well, I finally have a story to tell. I finally launched the new version of Sizzy last month. It went from a simple web app to a full-fledged browser for designers and developers. I would say that it’s been a very exciting month, but actually, it’s been a bumpy ride for 2.5 years. …

This has been on my mind for so long.

• Likes
• RTs
• Shares
• Metrics
• Followers
• Friends
• Stats
• Sleep tracking
• Quantified self
• Calorie counting
• Kilometers ran
• GitHub contributions
• Number of read books
• etc.
• etc.

Bullshit.

None of this matters. You have either reached your goal, or you haven’t. Progress is just a small steps towards it, but it’s not the goal. Lately I’ve been tweeting about the number of books that I have read, or the kilometers I have ran. It’s just a small way to lie to myself that I have accomplished my final goals. But I’m so far away from them, it hurts. Still, if I’m honest, the feedback that I get on the tweets makes me feel better about what I’ve done. Thankfully, I learned to recognize that feeling and I’m starting to hate it, again. …

Warning: This story is dramatically different from all of my previous Medium stories, so this is not a metaphor for working out programming problems, it’s about actual workouts, something that us, the developers, usually have a problem with.

I mean, who in their right mind would like to workout when there are fun programming problems to solve, feeds to scroll, and interesting people to exchange ideas with? It’s nice and cozy. It’s the ultimate comfort zone. When you wake up in the morning instead of jumping into your running shoes, you can’t wait to jump on Twitter/Slack/GitHub and see what’s new. …

Hello world!

I recently started playing with Electron in order to ship the native version of Sizzy. I used create-react-app (CRA) to bootstrap the app so I was assuming that wrapping it in an Electron shell would be easy-peasy. Turns out it’s a bit more complicated, so I tried to simplify the process for whoever is going to stumble upon this problem. Let’s go!

The development version

create-react-app appyarn add electron electron-builder wait-on concurrently --devyarn add electron-is-dev

Add this electron.js file to the “public” folder.

We’re adding it in the “public” folder instead of “src” so it can get copied to the “build” folder as it is. …

So, here’s how Sizzy happened.

You know the drill. You’re developing an app for a client and you need to make every page and every component work in every variation, on every device.

I was already using react-storybook to switch between all the variations of a component, but I still had to switch between 12 devices just to see the changes in all of them. And that’s how it all started.

How about making a tool where you can preview multiple screens at once as you work? That would be neat, huh!

How it all began

The initial tweet about the idea got 200+ likes and 60+ retweets so people were definitely interested in this kind of tool. …

Hey, I need to create a page that displays the latest activity from the users, so I just need to get the data from the REST endpoint and display it in some sort of filterable table, and update it if anything changes in the server. I was thinking maybe using jQuery to fetch and display the data?

-Sure, you could still use jQuery. But if you’re ever planning to do something more complicated on the frontend you should probably try React. It will be a big benefit for you in the future.

-Sounds great. How can i start with React?

-The easiest way is to run npm install create-react-app -g in your terminal and you can start with a project right away. …

If you’re working with React, you’re probably familiar with the create-react-app tool by now. If you’re not: it’s an official command line interface for building React applications with no build configuration.

With no build configuration.

With no build configuration…

With no build configuration!? But we need that! Kind of …

Now wait! Don’t jump on me with the “but it’s just supposed to be a simple tool, it doesn’t need any additional configuration!” argument!

👆 I posted a sneak peek of create-react-app + decorators on Twitter, and it looks like people are interested in it. But “decorators” is only one of the additional features we might need so we can switch to create-react-app for generating and building apps. …