The Web Huddle #0
The Web Huddle is our monthly roundup of the best links shared in the Black Pixel web team’s Slack channel.
The Uber Engineering Tech Stack
Uber’s Lucie Lozinksi shares notes on technologies that power the world’s largest TNC in The Uber Engineering Tech Stack. This two-part article starts off describing some of the core challenges faced by Uber’s engineering team before launching into a full-stack rundown of the tech they use in house. Lozinski lists many of the regular players in modern web and application development, along with some interesting proprietary technologies developed by Uber for monitoring and telemetry.
Reactotron
Reactotron is a cool looking React developer’s dashboard of sorts to “control, monitor, and instrument your React DOM and React Native apps.” It runs in your terminal and works great for monitoring logs, actions, API requests, and application state. Install Reactotron via npm and check out the readme for instructions on how to get started.
Flow Compared to Typescript
Google Software Engineer Naman Goel’s Flow Compared to Typescript is a solid overview comparing two of the most popular JavaScript type systems: Microsoft’s Typescript and Facebook’s Flow. Whether you’re firmly in one camp or the other, or just type-curious, spend a few minutes reading Goel’s article to understand the key differences between these two systems.
HyperTerm
JavaScript superhero Guillermo Rauch authored HyperTerm, a HTML/CSS/JS terminal built with with Electron. While this may seem like an unintuitive use case for web technologies, to quote our own Kevin Mahoney, “I actually hate how much I like it.” HyperTerm is fully pluggable and beautifully executed, which has helped it garner quick adoption by the web community at large.
Accessibility Guidelines
The fine folks over at Vox Media put together a great accessibility checklist for designers, engineers, PMs, and QA. They don’t get too detailed on all that can be done to build accessible web experiences, but this list serves as a solid, realistic baseline for most projects.
Functional Programming Jargon
When learning anything new, familiarizing yourself with a glossary of common terms is one of the best ways to kickstart knowledge retention. Not only does this help lay a foundational understanding of core concepts, but it helps you speak the language of that technology when searching for articles or asking for help. Hemanth.HM does a great job of describing common terms in the realm of functional programming in his article Functional Programming Jargon. Check it out so you stop thinking about Indian food when you read about currying or shady medications when you read about side effects.
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