Understanding How Reducers are Used in Redux
October 24th, 2019
A reducer is a function that determines changes to an application’s state. It uses the action it receives to determine this change. We have tools, like Redux, that help manage an application’s state changes in a single store so that they behave consistently. Why do we mention Redux when talking about reducers? Redux relies heavily…
What I Like About Writing Styles with Svelte
October 23rd, 2019
There’s been a lot of well-deserved hype around Svelte recently, with the project accumulating over 24,000 GitHub stars. Arguably the simplest JavaScript framework out there, Svelte was written by Rich Harris, the developer behind Rollup. There’s a lot to like about Svelte (performance, built-in state management, writing proper markup rather than JSX), but the big…
Netlify Build Plugins Announcement
October 22nd, 2019
Netlify just dropped a new thing: Build Plugins. (It’s in beta, so you have to request access for now.) Here’s my crack at explaining it, which is heavily informed from David Well’s announcement video. You might think of Netlify as that service that makes it easy to sling up some static files from a repo…
Preparing for the Future with React Prereleases
October 21st, 2019
To share upcoming changes with our partners in the React ecosystem, we’re establishing official prerelease channels. We hope this process will help us make changes to React with confidence and give developers the opportunity to try out experimental features. This post will be most relevant to developers who work on frameworks, libraries, or developer tooling….
Options for Hosting Your Own Non-JavaScript-Based Analytics
October 18th, 2019
There are loads of analytics platforms to help you track visitors and usage data on your sites. Perhaps most notably Google Analytics, which is widely used (including on this site), probably due to it’s ease of integration, feature-richness, and the fact that it’s free (until you need to jump up to the enterprise tier which…
The Angular Team @ AngularConnect 2019
October 17th, 2019
It was our pleasure to attend AngularConnect again this year and to talk to hundreds of amazing engineers. This year the team focused on sharing insights and opening the curtain into some of the internals of how Angular works and the challenges we are taking on as a team. Day 1 Keynote https://medium.com/media/9d572bdf17361262c050a37f883c52c4/href Igor Minar and I…
Ten-Ton Widgets
October 15th, 2019
At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order to add a “email us” button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat…
Let’s Make a Fancy, but Uncomplicated Page Loader
October 15th, 2019
It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve “perceived” performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is. There’s no shortage of ways to make…
Hack for Good
October 14th, 2019
The Angular and NativeScript teams teamed up last month to organise the first ng-ns Hack For Good — an online hackathon with prizes, where all participants were asked to build mobile apps with NativeScript Angular for NGOs and good causes. The rules were quite simple: starting from Thursday the 12th of September, participants — working alone or in teams of…
Recipes for Performance Testing Single Page Applications in WebPageTest
October 10th, 2019
WebPageTest is an online tool and an Open Source project to help developers audit the performance of their websites. As a Web Performance Evangelist at Theodo, I use it every single day. I am constantly amazed at what it offers to the web development community at large and the web performance folks particularly — for…