The tech-related writing of Nicholas C. Zakas

May 17, 2021

The lazy-loading property pattern in JavaScript

Traditionally, developers have created properties inside of JavaScript classes for any data that might be needed within an instance. This isn’t a problem for small pieces of data that are readily available inside of the constructor. However, if…

Two approaches to win an argument as a software engineer

If you’ve spent any time developing software professionally and then you are probably used to the spirited debates that take place between software engineers as well as between software engineers and management, design, and product…

Introducing Env: a better way to read environment variables in JavaScript

If you write server-side JavaScript, chances are you’ve need to read information from environment variables. It’s considered a best practice to share sensitive information, such as access tokens, inside…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Feb 11, 2021

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 7: Unhandled rejection tracking

When promises were introduced in ECMAScript 2015, they had an interesting flaw: if a promise didn’t have a rejection handler and was later rejected, you would have no idea. The rejection…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Jan 19, 2021

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 6: Promise.all() and Promise.allSettled()

In my last post, I walked you through the creation of the Promice.race() and Promise.any() methods, both of which work on multiple promises and return a single promise that…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Oct 21, 2020

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 4: Promise.resolve() and Promise.reject()

When you create a promise with the Promise constructor, you’re creating an unsettled promise, meaning the promise state is pending until either the resolve or reject function…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Oct 13, 2020

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 3: then(), catch(), and finally()

In my first post of this series, I explained how the Promise constructor works by recreating it as the Pledge constructor. In the second post in this series, I explained how asynchronous…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Oct 6, 2020

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 2: Resolving to a promise

In my first post of this series, I explained how the Promise constructor works by recreating it as the Pledge constructor. I noted in that post that there is nothing asynchronous about the constructor…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Sep 29, 2020

Creating a JavaScript promise from scratch, Part 1: Constructor

Early on in my career, I learned a lot by trying to recreate functionality I saw on websites. I found it helpful to investigate why something worked the way that it worked, and that lesson has stuck with me for decades…

Nicholas C. Zakas

Jul 27, 2020

How to safely use GitHub Actions in organizations

GitHub Actions [1] are programs designed to run inside of workflows [2], triggered by specific events inside a GitHub repository. To date, people use GitHub Actions to do things like run continuous integration (CI) tests, publish releases…