Useful tricks for debugging, formatting, and efficiency — The console is one of the first tools developers learn about. The console is the tool developers use when debugging their own applications. The law of the instrument states that it’s easy to develop overconfidence in a familiar tool. “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have…

Tools for conquering the process from Idea -> Design -> Development -> Deployment — Like many people, I have no shortage of ideas for apps that don’t genuinely need to exist. I tend to hold onto those ideas waiting for some imaginary occasion where free time is abundant and I can build all of them with no thought of income or expense. …

Export to React, after designing in Sketch, and tweaking keyframes in Haiku. — Making Animation Approachable Being a wizened guru of CSS used to be a barrier for entry to designing complex motion animations. Libraries like Lottie by AirBnb came around to make things easier for mobile by rendering animations from Adobe After Effects on iOS, Android, and React Native. Haiku is a new hybrid code/design…

If you’re like me, you jump through a lot of hoops to get Sass or Less to cooperate with a project, just to make it easier to add some variable colors and expressions to the styles throughout your codebase. A new feature of native CSS called Custom Properties can create…

Shave off hours of work with a simple to use React component built for images. Optimizing images hardly sounds like an ideal afternoon of work, but in today’s world it’s become a necessary evil. This post looks at how it can be done much easier using gatsby-image. For practical examples…