This CSS media query makes it easy to use a user’s default preference — Light or dark mode? Which to make your site default? With a simple css media query, prefers-color-scheme, you can read the minds of users (well their operating system preferences). Light and dark mode has become a widely adopted appearance setting found in most operating systems today. Users have already taken…

An intro to using Testcontainers, a Java library for testing using Docker containers and how we use it at GumGum on our Advertising API — Introduction In this post we will discuss Testcontainers, a Java library for building more robust testing. When talking about testing, we are familiar with unit testing and integration testing. While the first aims to guarantee the testing of a single piece of code, the second one aims to test the functionality…

See Your Ad 360° — Introduction Troubleshooting web-based issues can quickly become exercises in patience and extreme outside-the-box thinking, especially when there are multiple technologies, codebases, and partners at play. That’s why any tools that allow us to troubleshoot our case-specific problems can be so important. …

The second and final part of GumGum’s Git and git-flow workflow — Introduction Back in August 2019, I wrote git and git-flow, a guide. I intended it to be used internally by GumGum to familiarize new hires with the workflow we use. It covers a wide range of topics for people new to git and git-flow; however, it doesn’t cover everything I wanted…

Relax and put your seat belt on… You’re about to enter my journey of an intense 2 weeks sprint I recently led, swapping my DevOps hat for… — Relax and put your seat belt on… You’re about to enter my journey of an intense 2 weeks sprint I recently led, swapping my DevOps hat for a front-end one to build a full JAMStack website from the ground up deployed on AWS! Foreword & Context The GumGum Verity team applies machine learning…

An overview of the events and visualization used in our JavaScript Performance Monitoring Tool — Introduction JavaScript has become as crucial to many websites as the HTML it’s written in. The language may be regarded as the Toby Flenderson of programming languages by many developers, but without it, the functionality of so many of our favorite websites would crumble. And as the saying goes, with great…

Javascript is at the forefront of creating a beautiful user experience or a horrific latency filled nightmare once a site loads… — Introduction JavaScript is at the forefront of creating a beautiful user experience or a horrific latency filled nightmare once a site loads. It holds great responsibility for implementing complex features, adding interactivity, and the like on a page. And as web technologies progress over the years, so does the amount of…

We have used Storybook to document our React component library for a while, and although we love it, we’ve had to use various addon… — We have used Storybook to document our React component library for a while, and although we love it, we’ve had to use various addon packages and do some hacky things to get components to show how we wanted. Storybook has undergone some big versioning changes recently, so I sat down…