Practical Use Cases for JavaScript’s closest() Method
August 12th, 2020
Have you ever had the problem of finding the parent of a DOM node in JavaScript, but aren’t sure how many levels you have to traverse up to get to it? Let’s look at this HTML for instance: <div data-id=”123″> <button>Click me</button> </div> That’s pretty straightforward, right? Say you want to get the value…
React v17.0 Release Candidate: No New Features
August 9th, 2020
Today, we are publishing the first Release Candidate for React 17. It has been two and a half years since the previous major release of React, which is a long time even by our standards! In this blog post, we will describe the role of this major release, what changes you can expect in it,…
TypeScript, Minus TypeScript
August 6th, 2020
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock the last several years (and let’s face it, hiding under a rock sometimes feels like the right thing to do), you’ve probably heard of and likely used TypeScript. TypeScript is a syntactical superset of JavaScript that adds — as its name suggests — typing to the web’s favorite…
A Roadmap for Angular
August 5th, 2020
At the beginning of 2020 at ng-conf Hardwired, I talked about how we were evolving the team, improving our processes, and working to build stronger connections with the Angular community. One of the most important steps we are taking towards these goals is sharing more about what we’re working on, and some of the projects…
Making Sense of react-spring
August 4th, 2020
The animation is one of the trickier things to get right with React. In this post, I’ll try to provide the introduction to react-spring I wish I had when I first started out, then dive into some interesting use cases. While react-spring isn’t the only animation library for React, it’s one of the more popular…
A Lightweight Masonry Solution
August 3rd, 2020
Back in May, I learned about Firefox adding masonry to CSS grid. Masonry layouts are something I’ve been wanting to do on my own from scratch for a very long time, but have never known where to start. So, naturally, I checked the demo and then I had a lightbulb moment when I understood how…
style9: build-time CSS-in-JS
July 29th, 2020
In April of last year, Facebook revealed its big new redesign. An ambitious project, it was a rebuild of a large site with a massive amount of users. To accomplish this, they used several technologies they have created and open-sourced, such as React, GraphQL, Relay, and a new CSS-in-JS library called stylex. This new library…
A Font-Like SVG Icon System for Vue
July 24th, 2020
Managing a custom collection of icons in a Vue app can be challenging at times. An icon font is easy to use, but for customization, you have to rely on third-party font generators, and merge conflicts can be painful to resolve since fonts are binary files. Using SVG files instead can eliminate those pain points,…
Reactive jQuery for Spaghetti-fied Legacy Codebases
July 22nd, 2020
I can hear you crying out now: “Why on Earth would you want to use jQuery when there are much better tools available? Madness! What sort of maniac are you?” These are reasonable questions, and I’ll answer them with a little bit of context. In my current job, I am responsible for the care and…
How to Make a Monthly Calendar With Real Data
July 21st, 2020
Have you ever seen a calendar on a webpage and thought, how the heck did they did that? For something like that, it might be natural to reach for a plugin or even an embedded Google Calendar, but it’s actually a lot more straightforward to make one than you might think and only requires the…