My Foundation — What does it mean to be a frontend software architect? Is this even a thing? I was hired as one, so it must be — here’s how I want to add value to my team’s mission to build beautiful, stable and maintainable web apps that stand the test of time. …

React Finland 2019 was incredible! I was seriously impressed by the speaker lineup and the awesome talks. …

I recently switched from an Android phone to an iPhone and discovered that it is so much easier to test my web application running on localhost on my MacBook with my new phone. Here are the steps to make it work. On the iPhone, go to Settings → Safari →…

A Tale of Adventure, Ambition and JavaScript Unit Tests — Facebook’s unit test framework Jest has a lot going for it: it makes writing tests for React components a breeze with its snapshot testing feature, it runs tests very quickly through parallel test execution and it is very easy to set up. Inspired by Chris Pojer’s talk at JSConf.eu 2017…

How to use the latest version of React Router both on the server side and the client side — React Router is the most popular library in React-land for rendering different page contents depending on request URLs and manipulating the browser history to keep the URL displayed in the location bar in sync with your app as the user interacts with the page. Shiny and New Recently, version 4 of React Router…

Google has a recently published a fantastic overview of best practices for websites that use client-side rendering, e.g. using React: Building Indexable Progressive Web Apps Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are taking advantage of new technologies to bring the best of mobile sites and native…webmasters.googleblog.com The title implies it’s for progressive web apps, but the best practices are really for any old website that uses client-side rendering. If you care about getting organic search engine traffice from Google, this is a must read!

I recently tested whether client-side rendering would prevent websites from being crawled by search engine robots. As my article showed, React doesn’t seem to hurt search engine indexing at all. Now I’m taking it to the next level. …

Many people still worry that if you build a websites using tools like React, Angular, or Ember, it will hurt your search engine ranking. The thinking goes something like this: the web crawlers that search engines use won’t be able crawl a page properly unless it’s completely rendered in the…

I prefer to use Firefox Developer Edition for web development, mainly because I find Mozilla a much more likeable vendor than Google. Unfortunately, in Firefox Developer Edition, testing pages in a simulated mobile phone mode is much more complicated than in Google Chrome, which gives you a list of ready-made presets that you simply select. The following steps make FFDev display the web page as if it were displayed on an iPhone 6: