The Web Huddle #3
Friday, January 6, 2017
The Web Huddle is our monthly roundup of the best links shared in the Black Pixel web team’s Slack channel.
Browser Autofill Phishing
A browser’s autofill feature may be more of a security risk than one might guess at first glance. Viljami Kuosmanen demonstrates how this seemingly harmless feature can actually be used as phishing tactic. Be careful next time you use autofill!
JSON API Normalizer
While Redux data normalization is not a new concept, it’s up for debate on whether this normalization should live in the front-end. Yury Dymov provides a means to normalize the data coming from your backend, so that your front-end consumes already normalized data. This solves the problem of having a slight disconnect between front-end and backend data structures. However, it does require you to follow the JSON API format to a degree.
Clean Code JavaScript
Ryan McDermott took the software engineering principles from Robert C. Martin’s book “Clean Code” and adapted them for JavaScript. These kinds of documents really help develop a team’s cohesiveness. While things like linters assist with syntax errors and patterns, it’s much harder to get everyone on board with writing stylistically similar JavaScript. We encourage you to bring this into your own recommendations for your teams!
Airbnb ESLint Discussion
It’s quite common for developers to use or know of Airbnb’s JavaScript Style Guide and ESLint config. There is an open issue of rules that community members tend to override. There are definitely some overrides we agree with at Black Pixel. What rules do you tend to override? We encourage you to contribute to the discussion as it will inevitably produce an even better ESLint config for all.
Inferno Hits v1.0
Inferno is a lightweight and efficient JavaScript library that recently released v1.0! Inferno derives a lot of architecture and patterns from React, which is great if you’re familiar with that ecosystem and API. One of the core team members at Facebook even had this to say about Inferno:
Inferno 1.0 is really well written. It’s how I would’ve written React. I’d recommend reading its source to learn.
— React core team member at Facebook
At Black Pixel, we like to explore different frameworks to ensure that we always use the right tool for the job. Inferno has been on our list for quite some time now, and it’s awesome to see it finally reach a stable v1.0. Inferno’s author, Dominic Gannaway, recently joined the React team at Facebook, so hopefully soon we can see some of the optimizations that Inferno uses baked into React! It should be noted that Inferno’s development will absolutely continue even with Dominic joining the React team.
CSS in JS Performance Benchmarks
CSS in JS is an extremely hot topic in the web development world right now and for good reason. There are plenty of pros and cons for utilizing such a pattern. HelloFresh went out of its way to provide the community with a benchmark for some of the most popular CSS in JS libraries. Since a lot of the CSS in JS libraries share similar features, this can be useful if you need utmost performance in your application. However, as with all benchmarks, do not take these results as gospel.
Notable Tweets
Sean Larkin gives his opinion on the let vs. const debate:
Sam Saccone gives an insider tip on how you should be writing your tests:
Gajus Kuizinas shares a really helpful tip for Chrome Developer Tools:
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